Senior Software Engineering Manager, GKE APAC, Google Cloud (Mandarin and English)

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

• 8 years of experience with software development in one or more programming languages (e.g., Go, C++, Java, Python).

• 5 years of experience in a technical leadership role, overseeing projects, and 3 years of experience in a people management or team leadership role.

• 3 years of experience with distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, or container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes) and designing, building, or managing AI/ML infrastructure or workloads.

• Ability to communicate in Mandarin and English fluently to work with APAC customers and globally distributed engineering teams.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science or related technical field.

• Experience designing, building, or managing AI/ML infrastructure and workloads, including hardware accelerators (TPUs/GPUs) and advanced ML scheduling or orchestration frameworks (e.g., Ray, Slurm, Kueue, Volcano, JAX, or PyTorch).

• Deep technical expertise in large-scale container orchestration and cloud-native ecosystems, with experience in Kubernetes, managed platforms (e.g., GKE, EKS, AKS), or complex distributed systems.

• Experience of building cloud infrastructure, MLOps platforms, or containerized environments.

About the job:

Like Google's own ambitions, the work of a Software Engineer goes beyond just Search. Software Engineering Managers have not only the technical expertise to take on and provide technical leadership to major projects, but also manage a team of Engineers. You not only optimize your own code but make sure Engineers are able to optimize theirs. As a Software Engineering Manager you manage your project goals, contribute to product strategy and help develop your team. Teams work all across the company, in areas such as information retrieval, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, distributed computing, large-scale system design, networking, security, data compression, user interface design; the list goes on and is growing every day. Operating with scale and speed, our exceptional software engineers are just getting started -- and as a manager, you guide the way.

With technical and leadership expertise, you manage engineers across multiple teams and locations, a large product budget and oversee the deployment of large-scale projects across multiple sites internationally.

As a Software Engineering Manager, you will lead and grow Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE's) first engineering team in APAC: It collects APAC customer friction at the source, shows the patterns to GKE engineering, fixes whole classes of problems in the pillar codebases (Node, Storage, Networking, Scheduling, TPU/GPU), and builds those fixes into defaults and playbooks. You will manage the team and also stay technical. This is a greenfield team with a direct line to GKE engineering leadership.

The AI and Infrastructure team is redefining what’s possible. We empower Google customers with breakthrough capabilities and insights by delivering AI and Infrastructure at unparalleled scale, efficiency, reliability and velocity. Our customers include Googlers, Google Cloud customers, and billions of Google users worldwide.

We're the driving force behind Google's groundbreaking innovations, empowering the development of our cutting-edge AI models, delivering unparalleled computing power to global services, and providing the essential platforms that enable developers to build the future. From software to hardware our teams are shaping the future of world-leading hyperscale computing, with key teams working on the development of our TPUs, Vertex AI for Google Cloud, Google Global Networking, Data Center operations, systems research, and much more.

Responsibilities:

• Build and lead the APAC GKE engineering team: hire, onboard, develop team members. Set the team's culture, operating model, and roadmap from day one.

• Align with internal stakeholders on customer priorities and onboarding. Own a structured APAC customer friction log covering user journey, symptom, root cause, workaround cost, and customers affected. Publish a monthly top-friction digest and run a quarterly APAC friction review with GKE leads.

• Work to turn recurring customer workarounds into supported features in the pillar codebases. Use GKE extensibility to support customers who run their own Kubernetes, and bring their feedback back to the GKE roadmap.

• Provide same-timezone triage and escalation support for strategic APAC accounts, then grow it into APAC-daytime on-call for Node and Storage.

• Measure success by same-day APAC escalation response, number of customer-specific workarounds retired, and faster onboarding for new APAC accounts. Over time, extend coverage to India, Korea, Australia, and Southeast Asia.