Software Engineering Manager, YouTube Ads Machine Learning

Google; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 207,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Google is seeking a senior software engineer with extensive ML experience to lead design and optimize ML infrastructure within the YouTube Ads ML team. You will drive end-to-end ML systems, collaborate with researchers, and shape roadmap across multiple teams in a fast-paced environment.

Applicants should have a strong track record in ML, distributed systems, and leadership, with the ability to operate across a matrixed organization and influence priority decisions.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in software development.
• 5 years of experience leading ML design and optimizing ML infrastructure.
• 3 years of experience in a technical leadership role.
• 2 years of experience with GenAI techniques or related concepts.
• 2 years of experience in a people management or team leadership role.

Responsibilities

• Set and communicate team priorities aligned with the organization's goals.
• Set expectations with individuals and provide performance feedback and coaching.
• Develop mid-term technical goals and roadmap for one or more teams.
• Build end-to-end ML systems on large-scale data and research new architectures.
• Collect ground truth, feature engineering, experiments, and metrics analysis.

Skills

Software development

ML leadership

People management

GenAI techniques

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master’s degree or PhD

Tools

LLMs (Gemini)

Job description

In most instances, this position requires in-person interviews as part of the hiring process.

Minimum qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in software development.
• 5 years of experience leading ML design and optimizing ML infrastructure (e.g., model deployment, model evaluation, data processing, debugging, fine tuning).
• 3 years of experience in a technical leadership role.
• 2 years of experience with GenAI techniques (e.g., LLMs, Multi-Modal, Large Vision Models) or with GenAI-related concepts (language modeling, computer vision).
• 2 years of experience in a people management or team leadership role.

Preferred qualifications

• Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
• 3 years of experience working in a complex, matrixed organization.
• Strong problem solving and quantitative reasoning skills, demonstrated in a mathematical field such as data science, optimization, machine learning, or natural science.

About The Job

Google's software engineers develop the next-generation technologies that change how billions of users connect, explore, and interact with information and one another. Our products need to handle information at massive scale, and extend well beyond web search. We're looking for engineers who bring fresh ideas from all areas, including information retrieval, distributed computing, large-scale system design, networking and data storage, security, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, UI design and mobile; the list goes on and is growing every day. As a software engineer, you will work on a specific project critical to Google’s needs with opportunities to switch teams and projects as you and our fast-paced business grow and evolve. We need our engineers to be versatile, display leadership qualities and be enthusiastic to take on new problems across the full-stack as we continue to push technology forward.

With your extensive technical expertise you take initiative to independently design and implement new systems, designing, implementing, and testing multiple features with little or no direction from tech lead or manager. You collaborate with key stakeholders to determine future direction of work.

The YouTube Ads ML team is a research focused product team where we apply machine learning techniques for making ad recommendations on YouTube.

Google Ads is at the forefront of AI innovation, applying cutting-edge machine learning and Generative AI models like Gemini to power a multi-billion dollar global business.

Our work directly impacts billions of users by protecting users from harm, improving ad quality, and optimizing campaigns for advertiser return-on-investment. We foster a culture of deep collaboration, partnering closely with teams like Google Research and DeepMind to solve complex challenges. Join us to work on state‑of-the‑art AI, take on problems at an unparalleled scale, and build the next generation of advertising technology. Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

US: $207000 - $300000 (USD) + 20% bonus target + equity + benefits

Responsibilities

Learn more about benefits at Google.

• Set and communicate team priorities that support the broader organization's goals. Align strategy, processes, and decision‑making across teams.
• Set clear expectations with individuals based on their level and role and aligned to the broader organization's goals. Meet regularly with individuals to discuss performance and development and provide feedback and coaching.
• Develop the mid‑term technical goals and roadmap within the scope of your (often multiple) team(s). Evolve the roadmap to meet anticipated future requirements and infrastructure needs.
• Build end to end machine learning systems on large scale data and research novel deep model architectures, read papers, implement and deploy them.
• Collect ground truth, exploratory models, feature engineering, deep model architectures, live experiments on YouTube users, tuning, metrics analysis.

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.