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About This Role
The application window will be open until at least April 23, 2026\. This opportunity will remain online based on business needs which may be before or after the specified date.
Applicants in the County of Los Angeles: Qualified applications with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act.
This role may also be located in our Playa Vista, CA campus.
Applicants in San Francisco: Qualified applications with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act.
In accordance with Washington state law, we are highlighting our comprehensive benefits package, which is available to all eligible US based employees. Benefits for this role include:* Health, dental, vision, life, disability insurance
- Retirement Benefits: 401(k) with company match
- Paid Time Off: 20 days of vacation per year, accruing at a rate of 6\.15 hours per pay period for the first five years of employment
- Sick Time: 40 hours/year (increased to 69 hours/year for Seattle) including 5 discretionary sick days per instance
- Maternity Leave (Short\-Term Disability \+ Baby Bonding): 28\-30 weeks
- Baby Bonding Leave: 18 weeks
- Holidays: 13 paid days per year
Note: By applying to this position you will have an opportunity to share your preferred working location from the following: San Francisco, CA, USA; Boulder, CO, USA; Cambridge, MA, USA; Mountain View, CA, USA; New York, NY, USA; Reston, VA, USA; Seattle, WA, USA; Sunnyvale, CA, USA; Los Angeles, CA, USA; Washington D.C., DC, USA; Austin, TX, USA; Chicago, IL, USA; San Diego, CA, USA; Addison, TX, USA; Detroit, MI, USA; Irvine, CA, USA; Kirkland, WA, USA; Miami, FL, USA; Portland, OR, USA.### Minimum qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 6 years of experience building and shipping production\-grade AI\-driven solutions to external or internal customers using Python, Typescript or comparable languages.
- Experience leading technical discovery sessions with business stakeholders and engineering teams to define AI and hardware infrastructure requirements.
- Experience architecting scalable AI systems on cloud platforms e.g., Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
- Experience building pipelines for structured, unstructured data, incorporating vector databases and retrieval\-augmented generation (RAG)\-like architectures to power enterprise\-grade AI solutions.
### Preferred qualifications:
- Master’s degree or PhD in AI, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
- Experience implementing multi\-agent systems using frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, CrewAI, or Google’s ADK) and patterns like ReAct, self\-reflection, and hierarchical delegation.
- Knowledge of LLM\-native metrics (tokens/sec, cost\-per\-request) and techniques for optimizing state management and granular tracing.
About the job
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As a GenAI Forward Deployed Engineer at Google Cloud, you will be an embedded builder bridging the gap between frontier AI products and production\-grade reality for our customers. You will function as a builder\-consultant, moving beyond high\-level architecture to code, debug, and jointly ship bespoke agentic solutions directly within the customer’s environment.
This role is designed for high\-agency engineers with a founder’s mindset. You will manage blockers to production including solving the integration complexities, data readiness issues, and state\-management issues that prevent AI from reaching enterprise\-grade maturity. By embedding with accounts, you will serve a dual purpose: providing white\-glove deployment of AI systems and acting as a critical feedback loop, transforming real\-world field insights into Google Cloud’s future product roadmap.
It's an exciting time to join Google Cloud’s Go\-To\-Market team, leading the AI revolution for businesses worldwide. You’ll excel by leveraging Google's brand credibility—a legacy built on inventing foundational technologies and proven at scale. We’ll provide you with the world's most advanced AI portfolio, including frontier Gemini models, and the complete Vertex AI platform, helping you to solve business problems. We’re a collaborative culture providing direct access to DeepMind's engineering and research minds, empowering you to solve customer challenges. Join us to be the catalyst for our mission, drive customer success, and define the new cloud era—the market is yours.
The US base salary range for this full\-time position is $153,000\-$222,000 \+ bonus \+ equity \+ benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. 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 preferred 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. Learn more about benefits at Google.
Responsibilities
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- Serve as the lead developer for AI applications, transitioning from rapid prototypes to production\-grade agentic workflows (e.g., multi\-agent systems, MCP servers) that drive measurable return on investment.
- Architect and code the connective tissue between Google’s AI products and customer's live infrastructure, including APIs, legacy data silos, and security perimeters.
- Build high\-performance evaluation pipelines and observability frameworks to ensure agentic systems meet rigorous requirements for accuracy, safety, and latency.
- Identify repeatable field patterns and technical friction points in Google’s AI stack, converting them into reusable modules or product feature requests for the Engineering teams.
- Drive engineering excellence by mentoring talent, co\-building with customer teams, and influencing cross\-functional strategies to uplevel organizational technical capabilities.
Google is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. See also Google's EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know by completing our Accommodations for Applicants form.
Salary Context
This $153K-$222K range is above the 75th percentile for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $100K across 15465 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 26,159 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 91% of the market. At Google, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $166,983 based on 13,781 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $131,300. This role's midpoint ($187K) sits 12% above the category median. Disclosed range: $153K to $222K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $184,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $309,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($293,500) and AI Architect ($292,900). By seniority level: Entry: $76,880; Mid: $131,300; Senior: $227,400; Director: $244,288; VP: $234,620.
Google AI Hiring
Google has 434 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer, AI Product Manager, AI Software Engineer, AI Architect. Positions span New York, NY, US, San Francisco, CA, US, Seattle, WA, US. Compensation range: $112K - $427K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 7% (1,863 positions) offer remote work, while 24,200 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: Los Angeles (1,695 roles, $178,000 median); New York (1,670 roles, $200,000 median); San Francisco (1,059 roles, $244,000 median).
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 26,159 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 2,416 entry-level, 16,247 mid-level, 5,153 senior, and 2,343 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 7% of the market (1,863 positions). The remaining 24,200 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $184,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $309,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($293,500 median, 28 roles); AI Architect ($292,900 median, 108 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 19 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 26,159 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (23,752), AI Software Engineer (598), AI Product Manager (594). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (2,416) are outnumbered by mid-level (16,247) and senior (5,153) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 2,343 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 7% of all AI roles (1,863 positions), with 24,200 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $184,000. Top-quartile roles start at $244,000, and the 90th percentile reaches $309,400. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Engineering Manager roles lead at $293,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $122,200. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Rag (16,749 postings), Aws (8,932 postings), Rust (7,660 postings), Python (3,815 postings), Azure (2,678 postings), Gcp (2,247 postings), Prompt Engineering (1,469 postings), Openai (1,269 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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