The Staff Software Engineer role within Google Photos' Processing and Serving team focuses on building and maintaining the backend infrastructure powering key features. Responsibilities include collaborating with cross-functional partners to define team goals and strategy, delivering high-quality software solutions, building automation platforms for faster development (especially for ML features), improving cost and capacity management, and enhancing system reliability and performance. The ideal candidate will have extensive software development experience (8+ years), technical leadership experience (3+ years), and people management experience (2+ years). The team manages millions of queries per second, serving users worldwide.