Senior Software Engineer

About X:

X is Alphabet’s moonshot factory with a mission of inventing and launching “moonshot” technologies that could someday make the world a radically better place. We are a diverse group of inventors and entrepreneurs who build and launch technologies that aim to improve the lives of millions, even billions, of people. Our goal: 10x impact on the world’s most intractable problems, not just 10% improvement. We approach projects that have the aspiration and riskiness of research with the speed and ambition of a startup. As an innovation engine, X focuses on repeatedly turning breakthrough-technology ideas into the foundations for large, sustainable businesses.

About the team:

We're a small, passionate and driven team of experienced ML researchers, software engineers and product managers on a mission to make the practice of law radically more efficient and accurate. Our project is focusing on de-risking our technology quickly, refining our tech prototypes, running experiments with partners and developing a valuable product for our users.  Our culture is one of mutual care & respect, individual competence and most important of all, fun!

Learn more about our moonshot here: https://x.company/blog/posts/moonshot-for-professional-intelligence/

About the role:

As our resident software expert in large scale data pipelines, you will own the end-to-end development of breakthrough product infrastructure and technologies that rely heavily on large language models. Your work will focus on designing and building large-scale data pipelines capable of processing millions of documents for search and ranking, efficient data storage, and batch/incremental ML processing on Google Cloud Platform. We will rely on your strong technical leadership and interpersonal skills to collaborate with domain experts, refining our technology stack from ideation to production delivery.

How you will make 10X Impact:

• Drive the end-to-end lifecycle of product infrastructure, from initial ideation and architecture to production delivery and realized impact.
• Act like an owner; be fearless in diving deep, asking questions, proposing solutions, establishing consensus and then making shit happen.
• Design and implement robust, automated, production-grade software using horizontally scalable components for batch and incremental processing at scale. This includes demonstrating strong technical leadership by applying software engineering best practices, ensuring high code quality, and managing the full software release lifecycle (unit testing, CI/CD, and production operations).
• Work effectively with cross-functional teams of engineers, product managers, and domain experts
• Multiply your own productivity using the latest Gen AI coding tools, e.g. Claude Code, Cursor or Codex
• Provide direction and focus in areas of high ambiguity 
• Enjoy mentoring junior engineers and helping a team grow

What you should have:

• Bachelors/Masters in Computer Science is preferred, but at least 6+ years professional experience building products is required.
• Significant on-the-job experience building and managing complex, large-scale data pipelines and data lakes using Airflow, Apache Beam (Dataflow), Flume, and Spark to process millions of documents.
• Hands-on experience building and optimizing infrastructure for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, including search and ranking components.
• Experience interacting with diverse data storage solutions, e.g. NoSQL, SQL, blob storage, vector databases, caches and understanding the pros and cons of each
• Significant on-the-job experience designing, developing, maintaining and releasing software, along with ownership in making product tradeoffs and design decisions
• Strong proficiency in Python development, with experience in the latest Python toolchains and frameworks, e.g. uv, ruff, fastapi, Pydantic
• Experience with managing software in production, including configuration, deployment and monitoring
• Experience with Cloud providers such as Google Cloud Platform or AWS.
• Experience owning and building end-to-end production systems that span multiple quarters of work, from design to implementation to production delivery and realized impact.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, e.g. design docs, PR descriptions

 It’d be great if you had these:

• Experience in infrastructure-as-code, e.g. Terraform 
• Exposure to productions systems that rely heavily on ML models, and/or experience with model deployment
• Experience working in start-up like environments where things can change on a dime
• Consistent track record of delivering high quality solutions to large, complex software problems
• Experience in finding the exact right meme or gif for any situation
• Joy in learning new technologies, learning from your teammates and teaching them as well!
• Passion for delighting users, but also extracting energy from both good and difficult feedback
• Experience in agonizing over a technical decision for about ten minutes before understanding what the product and the team needs most and doing that (but then still wondering if you did the right thing)

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $174,000 - $261,000 + bonus + equity + benefits. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your location during the hiring process.

Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits.