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Google

Customer Engineer, Databases, Google Public Sector

$152K - $222K Washington, DC, US Mid Posted July 16, 2026

Role Description

Must be a US Citizen to meet customer and compliance requirements, including potential access to classified information.

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: Reston, VA, USA; Atlanta, GA, USA; Washington D.C., DC, USA.### Minimum qualifications:

  • Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
  • 10 years of experience with cloud native architecture in a customer-facing or support role.
  • Experience engaging with, and presenting to, technical stakeholders and executive leaders.
  • Experience with database technologies or concepts (e.g., Postgres, Oracle, MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server, NoSQL, data migrations, scaling, replication, query management).
  • Experience using programming languages to design demos, prototypes, or workshops for customers.
  • Experience with databases on cloud native architectures.

Preferred qualifications:

  • Experience working with customers in the Public Sector industry.
  • Experience with aspects of cloud computing (infrastructure, storage, platforms and data), as well as the cloud market, engaged dynamics and customer buying behavior.
  • Experience with optimizing database performance with respect to transactional or analytic workloads.
  • Experience in understanding customer requirements with the ability to break down requirements and design technical architectures.
  • Experience with architecture design, implementing, tuning, schema design and query optimization of scalable and distributed systems.

About the job -----------------

When leading companies choose Google Cloud, it's a huge win for spreading the power of cloud computing globally. Once educational institutions, government agencies, and other businesses sign on to use Google Cloud products, you come in to facilitate making their work more productive, mobile, and collaborative. You listen and deliver what is most helpful for the customer. You assist fellow sales Googlers by problem-solving key technical issues for our customers. You liaise with the product marketing management and engineering teams to stay on top of industry trends and devise enhancements to Google Cloud products.

As a Customer Engineer (CE) with a specialty in Databases, you will partner with technical sales teams to differentiate Google Cloud to our customers. You will serve as a technical expert responsible for accelerating technical wins and adoption of complex, specialized workloads. You will leverage your deep expertise in our product areas, in partnership with Platform CEs, to design data foundation architectures and develop MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) to promote new, highly specialized solutions to customers. You will solve analytics-centered customer issues and provide a critical feedback loop to unblock customers and influence product development.

Google Public Sector brings the magic of Google to the mission of government and education with solutions purpose-built for enterprises. We focus on helping United States public sector institutions accelerate their digital transformations, and we continue to make significant investments and grow our team to meet the complex needs of local, state and federal government and educational institutions.Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

US: $152000 - $222000 (USD) + 42.86% bonus target + equity + benefits

Learn more about benefits at Google.Responsibilities --------------------

* Drive the technical win for complex workloads within data analytics to ensure rapid and successful adoption, primarily supporting the business cycle from use case identification, technical evaluation, and through customer ramp. * Combine business strategies and direct development and prototyping to provide functional, customer-tailored solutions that secure buy-in from customer domain experts. * Provide deep technical consultation to customers, acting as a technical advisor and building lasting customer relationships. * Leverage learnings from customer engagements to contribute to reusable solutions and assets with the Go-To-Market team. * Provide critical feedback from customer engagements to product and engineering teams to improve architectures and solutions. Work within product and engineering management systems to document, prioritize and drive resolution of customer feature requests and issues. 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.

About Forward Deployed Engineering

Forward Deployed Engineers are embedded directly with customers to build custom solutions, integrate products into existing infrastructure, and bridge the gap between product engineering and customer success. The role combines deep technical skills with the ability to operate in client environments and translate business requirements into working software.

Originally pioneered by Palantir, the FDE model has spread across AI, enterprise SaaS, and cloud infrastructure companies. FDEs write production code, architect integrations, train customer teams, and feed product insights back to the core engineering organization. At companies like OpenAI, Salesforce, and Databricks, FDE teams are treated as elite engineering units that can ship custom solutions in days rather than quarters.

Typical FDE stack: Python, TypeScript, SQL, REST/GraphQL APIs, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), and increasingly LLM APIs and AI orchestration frameworks. Strong communication and the ability to context-switch between technical and business conversations are as important as coding ability.

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