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Google

Customer Engineer, Platform, SLED, Higher Education, Public Sector

$152K - $222K Mountain View, CA, US Mid Posted July 15, 2026

Role Description

Note: By applying to this position you will have an opportunity to share your preferred working location from the following: Sunnyvale, CA, USA; Mountain View, CA, 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 cloud infrastructure engineering, on-premise environments, virtualization, or containerization platforms.

Ability to travel up to 30% of the time to university campuses, industry conferences, and related events as required to advocate Google Public Sector's goals and engage directly with educational leaders. *

Preferred qualifications:

  • Experience partnering with Higher Education customers, specifically R1 and R2 institutions, to drive digital transformation and AI-readiness.
  • Experience architecting innovative solutions and building compelling demonstrations using generative AI technologies, specifically Gemini and autonomous agentic workflows.
  • Expertise migrating and modernizing legacy applications to scalable cloud platforms, laying the essential data groundwork for advanced AI/ML workloads.
  • Understanding of enterprise security and complex networking principles as needed to secure AI pipelines, LLM deployments, and distributed architectures.
  • Proven agility to rapidly learn and adapt to the changing evolution of emerging AI methodologies and new Google Cloud solutions.

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

As a Customer Engineer, you will partner with technical Sales teams to differentiate Google Cloud and our unique Google Public Sector offerings for our R1 and R2 higher education customers in California. You will empower universities and colleges to harness the full potential of the Google ecosystem by designing creative, agentic AI solutions that solve complex institutional issues.

Moving beyond traditional data lifecycles, you will lead proofs of concept and guide technical strategy to build proactive, autonomous AI agents and intelligent data ecosystems that transform the student, researcher, and administrative experience. Leveraging your technical expertise and compelling presentation skills, you will engage with educational leaders to translate their academic requirements into visionary, highly automated, and practical architectures tailored for the public sector.

Bringing excellent technical, communication, and organizational skills, you will join a team of fellow Googlers dedicated to mutual respect and equal opportunities for success.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 --------------------

* Collaborate with the Sales team to uncover and qualify Google Cloud and AI-first opportunities, proactively addressing technical objections around adoption, and developing pathways to clear technical blockers. * Lead the technical relationship with our premier Higher Education customers in California, leading immersive product briefings on Google Cloud and Google's GenAI portfolio, driving innovative, agentic proof-of-concept (PoC) work, and orchestrating specialized technical resources across Google Public Sector. * Demonstrate and rapidly prototype intelligent integrations, bringing autonomous agents and AI-powered workflows to life directly within complex customer and partner environments. * Design and recommend AI-optimized enterprise architectures and integration strategies, laying the secure platform and data infrastructure foundations required to successfully deploy comprehensive, forward-looking solutions using Google Cloud best practices. 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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