Senior Backend Software Engineer, Developer Productivity Engineering
Technical lead for Tapestry (Alphabet's electric-grid moonshot at X) co-anchoring the Infrastructure and Developer Productivity team: architecting multi-tenant GKE/GCP compute platforms, CI/CD and self-service developer tooling, Terraform-based infrastructure, observability, and secure AI-agent sandboxes. Needs 8+ years in infra/SRE/platform engineering plus 2+ years as a Tech Lead/Staff Engineer.
- Compensation
- $207K–$290K / yr
- Location
- Mountain View, CA (HQ)
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- 8+ years
- Category
- Backend
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 8+ years of production experience in Infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Developer Productivity/Platform Engineering
- 2+ years as a formal Tech Lead or Staff Engineer directing technical roadmap, architecture, and execution across multiple teams
- Advanced production-grade expertise with Kubernetes (GKE), container networking, and multi-tenant cloud architectures (Google Cloud Platform preferred)
- Deep architectural experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar) managing multi-environment cloud footprints
- Proven track record building large-scale automated build/test/release pipelines (e.g., Tekton, GitHub Actions, Argo Workflows, Bazel)
- Platform-as-a-Product mindset: interviewing stakeholders, quantifying developer friction, and measurably improving deployment frequency and MTTR
Nice to have
- Experience designing infrastructure, sandboxes, and execution runtimes for AI agents, LLM evaluations, or high-performance GPU orchestration
- Hands-on architectural exposure to large-scale data platforms (e.g., BigQuery, Spark, Kafka, Ray) or distributed simulation environments
- Knowledge of Google-internal infrastructure primitives (Borg, Monarch, Spanner, Piper/Blaze) or operationalizing an X moonshot into production
- Background in high-throughput platform tooling or developer infrastructure at high-scale companies (e.g., Netflix, Snowflake, LinkedIn, Datadog)
Full description
About Tapestry
Tapestry is a group within Google working to build the AI-powered electric grid. We are tackling one of the world’s most important infrastructure challenges: helping the energy system become more visible, understandable, reliable, affordable, abundant, and clean.
Originally born at X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory, Tapestry brings together experts in energy, AI, software engineering, and products to build tools that help the electricity ecosystem plan smarter, move faster, and operate more efficiently.
This is a global effort. Tapestry supports partners across the U.S., U.K., Chile, New Zealand, Australia, and Brazil as they work toward a cleaner, more resilient energy future.
Joining Tapestry means doing high-impact work with a multidisciplinary team tackling a problem that matters at global scale. Learn more about our team and our mission here.
About the Role
We are seeking a Senior Backend Software Engineer to join our Infrastructure and Developer Productivity team.
Our systems must process massive amounts of power-grid data, run heavy scientific simulations, and support emerging AI workflows. You will treat our internal infrastructure as a product. Building reliable, self-service tools for our developers, automating our delivery pipelines, and creating secure environments where engineers and automated agents can build and test software quickly and safely.
How You Will Make 10X Impact
- Core Cloud & Compute Platform: Architect and operate scalable, multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Ensure efficient compute scheduling and autoscaling across mixed hardware workloads (CPUs, GPUs, and TPUs) supporting simulation and machine learning models. Design resilient networking, IAM boundaries, and secure multi-project cloud environments.
- Developer Velocity & CI/CD: Design fast, hermetic, and automated build, test, and release pipelines that reduce cycle times for product engineers. Provide reliable, on-demand testing environments so teams can validate changes safely before production. Build automated deployment and rollback mechanisms with clear canary verification.
- Infrastructure as Code & Security: Drive declarative, reproducible cloud infrastructure using modern Infrastructure-as-Code (such as Terraform). Implement automated policy checks, secret management, and container vulnerability scanning into standard deployment workflows.
- AI Tooling & Execution Sandboxes: Design secure, isolated sandbox environments that allow automated AI tools and agents to safely run tests and inspect code. Identify high-leverage opportunities to automate repetitive developer workflows using modern AI tools.