Staff Research Scientist, Computer Vision/Remote Sensing Full-time

Minimum qualifications:

• PhD degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 4 years of experience with research agendas across multiple teams or projects.
• One or more scientific publication submission(s) for conferences, journals, or public repositories.

Preferred qualifications:

• 2 years of experience in coding and leading multiple research efforts and influencing research direction.
• Experience with Tensorflow/Jax/Flax libraries.
• Experience with Computer Vision, using deep learning and modern architectures.
• Experience building, tuning, evaluating, and using foundation models.
• Experience with Remote Sensing data (e.g., multi-spectral, hyper-spectral, SAR) and Google Earth Engine.
• Excellent software engineering skills using Python or C .

About the job

As an organization, Google maintains a portfolio of research projects driven by fundamental research, new product innovation, product contribution and infrastructure goals, while providing individuals and teams the freedom to emphasize specific types of work. As a Research Scientist, you’ll setup large-scale tests and deploy promising ideas quickly and broadly, managing deadlines and deliverables while applying the latest theories to develop new and improved products, processes, or technologies. From creating experiments and prototyping implementations to designing new architectures, our research scientists work on real-world problems that span the breadth of computer science, such as machine (and deep) learning, data mining, natural language processing, hardware and software performance analysis, improving compilers for mobile platforms, as well as core search and much more.

As a Research Scientist, you’ll also actively contribute to the wider research community by sharing and publishing your findings, with ideas inspired by internal projects as well as from collaborations with research programs at partner universities and technical institutes all over the world.

Our team focuses on developing foundation models for remote sensing (i.e., satellite, aerial) imagery. We aim to simplify and enhance various remote sensing tasks including land use/land cover segmentation, object detection, and change detection for use by Google teams and external partners. We also investigate natural language interfaces for remote sensing imagery through vision-language models and tasks such as captioning and visual question answering.

Google Research addresses challenges that define the technology of today and tomorrow. From conducting fundamental research to influencing product development, our research teams have the opportunity to impact technology used by billions of people every day.

Our teams aspire to make discoveries that impact everyone, and core to our approach is sharing our research and tools to fuel progress in the field — we publish regularly in academic journals, release projects as open source, and apply research to Google products.

Responsibilities

• Lead research in foundation models for remote sensing, including hypothesis generation, experimentation, and roadmap development.
• Collaborate with internal and external teams to integrate geospatial efforts and optimize model usage.
• Mentor team members and publish research findings to share knowledge and generate impact.
• Drive research growth by staying abreast of trends, reviewing academic papers, and contributing to the research community.
• Identify and address technology gaps, develop research strategies, and implement solutions with defined timelines and resources.