Staff Software Engineer, Games, Inception, DeepMind in London

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in one or more programming languages (e.g., C++, Python, or JavaScript).
• Experience leading technical strategy across multi-disciplinary teams (e.g., Research, Product, Design) to align engineering roadmaps with non-technical business goals.
• Experience in a technical leadership role (Lead or Staff) through the full software development Life Cycle (SDLC) for one or more shipped AAA title or large-scale interactive product.
• Experience in game tech research and development, including AI/ML, procedural generation, and advanced engine optimization.
• Experience in architecting 0-to-1 systems.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience training ML models or integrating generative AI into consumer‑facing products.
• Experience building high‑performance web frontends or interactive browser‑based experiences.
• Experience contributing to open‑source projects or leading innovative technical experiments.
• Knowledge of modern game engines (Unreal, Unity, Godot) or proprietary internal frameworks.
• Familiarity with Google’s internal infrastructure (google3) and development workflows.

About The Job:

Inception runs like a startup, balancing high energy idea generation with pragmatic, clear and regularly refined operations. This collaborative, multidisciplinary group is situated primarily in London and Mountain View with collaborators across the globe. It has a sizable portfolio of early stage, design focused projects, building on working processes developed internally on projects such as Astra and Genie. As a Software Engineer in Inception, you will build breakthrough experiences, crafting expert pipelines and infrastructure when necessary. You will propose novel technical solutions to creative problems, blurring the lines between game development and AI research. Your mission is to move beyond traditional game engineering to create interactive experiences that wouldn’t be possible without AI. You will work in a cross‑functional team where every project involves significant experimentation and collaboration with a range of partners. Artificial intelligence will be one of humanity’s most transformative inventions. At DeepMind, we are a pioneering AI lab with exceptional interdisciplinary teams focused on advancing AI development to solve complex global challenges and accelerate high‑quality product innovation for billions of users. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, ensuring safety and ethics are always our highest priority. We are pushing the boundaries across multiple domains. Our global teams offer learning opportunities and varied career pathways for those driven to achieve exceptional results through collective effort.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement technical foundations to integrate generative models and agentic workflows as core gameplay mechanics.
• Lead the integration of streaming models into game engines, ensuring high‑fidelity and low‑latency user experiences.
• Partner with designers and researchers to creatively solve early‑stage bottlenecks and mask latency or consistency issues in probabilistic models.
• Build internal tools and establish best practices to empower the team to efficiently experiment with complex AI pipelines.
• Create secure, compliant pipelines for data management, model testing, and deployment within experimental environments.

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.