It is a very research-oriented experience, but you can definitely frame your work as more engineering-intensive. Quite a few of the residents have done some more really impressive engineering feats in the research domain.
If you are looking for an engineering oriented experience you should apply for a full time Software Engineer or Intern position.
Already a fulltime Engineer myself, I guess what I am looking at can be more phrased as applied machine learning, to solve production related problems. This is somewhat different than a regular engineering role though.
We have a few programs for this. As I mentioned above, the ML ninjas program is like an internal engineering nfocused residency for existing SWEs. There's also a huge amount of internal training courses to get up to speed on machine learning. There are, however, options for existing employees. (step 1: apply for job.)
The role of Software Engineer at Google is boarder than in other companies. Applied Machine Learning and actually even most research is done by Software Engineers.