Michael Liang

Staff Software Engineer at Google, building AI shopping agents.

Seattle area

Mechanical engineer turned software engineer. I studied mechanical engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong (B.S.) and Michigan (M.S.), then made the switch to software at MathWorks. Since then I've built AI, security, fintech, and agent products at Google, Perplexity, AWS, and Brex, and I'm now building AI shopping agents at Google.

01 Experience

  1. 2026 — Now

    Google

    Staff Software Engineer

    Agentic commerce on Google Cloud's customer engagement AI.

    • Agentic commerce
    • AI agents

    Kirkland, WA

  2. 2025 — 2026

    Perplexity

    Member of Technical Staff

  3. 2024 — 2025

    Amazon Web Services

    Senior Software Development Engineer

    Frontier threat detection on Amazon GuardDuty, including Extended Threat Detection.

    • Security
    • Threat detection

    Seattle, WA

  4. 2022 — 2024

    Brex

    Technical Lead

    Led Brex Payables; built the Brex API, integrations ecosystem, and user and access management.

    • Fintech
    • Payables
    • Public API
    • Integrations

    Seattle, WA

  5. 2019 — 2022

    Amazon Web Services

    Software Development Engineer

    Founding engineer on the data plane for Amazon Monitron, AI predictive maintenance.

    • Data plane
    • Predictive maintenance

    Boston, MA

  6. 2017 — 2019

    MathWorks

    Development Application Engineer

    Test and performance infrastructure; where the switch to software started.

    • Testing
    • Performance

    Natick, MA · Software Engineering Intern, 2017

02 Projects

03 Writing

Latest

The internet is splitting in two

Intent goes to APIs and personal agents. Browsing keeps the UI.

Read on LinkedIn ↗

Also written about

  • TDD with LLMs
  • Exception handling in streaming systems
  • Breaking into software engineering without a CS degree
All posts on LinkedIn ↗

04 Education

  • 2016 — 2017

    University of Michigan

    M.S., Mechanical Engineering

  • 2012 — 2016

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University

    B.S., Mechanical Engineering