Tech Lead, YouTube Shorts Discovery, ML Recommendations

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

Job summary

Google LLC's Shorts initiative in Mountain View seeks a Tech Lead to steer discovery and ML recommendations for Shorts. You will own end-to-end ML system design and cross-functional collaboration to deliver scalable, high-quality recommendations.

The role emphasizes hands-on leadership, building personalized ranking models, and guiding ML infrastructure and data processing across a distributed team at Google.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in software development.
• 5 years of experience testing, and launching software products, and 3 years of experience with software design and architecture.
• 5 years of experience with speech/voice tech, reinforcement learning, or another ML field.
• 5 years of experience with ML design and ML infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to personalized quality recommendations and help build and grow a promising new product within Google, focusing on the discovery/recommendation engine and LLM-based recommendation systems.
• Provide technical leadership on high-impact projects. Manage project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables.
• Facilitate alignment and clarity across teams on goals, outcomes, and timelines. Influence and coach a distributed team of engineers.
• Lead the design and implementation of solutions in specialized ML areas, optimize ML infrastructure, and guide the development of model optimization and data processing strategies.
• Design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, and enhance large scale software solutions.

Skills

Software development

Testing & launching

Design & architecture

Speech/voice tech

Reinforcement learning

ML infrastructure

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience

Master's degree or PhD in CS/ML/AI

Job description

Tech Lead, YouTube Shorts Discovery, ML Recommendations

Share Tech Lead, YouTube Shorts Discovery, ML Recommendations

YouTube Mountain View, CA, USA

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

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
  
• 8 years of experience in software development.
  
• 5 years of experience testing, and launching software products, and 3 years of experience with software design and architecture.
• 5 years of experience with one or more of the following: speech/audio (e.g., technology duplicating and responding to the human voice), reinforcement learning (e.g., sequential decision making), or specialization in another ML field.
  
• 5 years of experience with ML design and ML infrastructure (e.g., model deployment, model evaluation, data processing, debugging, fine tuning).

Preferred qualifications:

• Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, or a related technical field.
• 8 years of experience in data structures and algorithms, with experience building distributed, large-scale machine learning systems.
• 3 years of experience in a technical leadership role, defining technical goals, setting roadmap direction, and mentoring executive engineering teams.
• Experience designing and deploying recommendation systems, personalized ranking models, or retrieval systems.
• Expertise in managing the cold-start problem, reinforcement learning, or exploration/exploitation algorithms.

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.

The Short-form Video team owns everything from the mobile creation experience and related mobile effects (e.g., text, stickers, filters) , through a new video player experience that provides full screen videos with a quick tap to see the next videos, and through all the backend systems to allow creating and serving these videos and recommending them to users on home, search, and more.

Shorts exploration is a critical part of shorts recommendation with the mission to find an initial audience for fresh videos to enlarge our recommendable corpus and to inspire creation. We leverage various modeling techniques and signals to build initial audiences for fresh videos within the recommendation stack.

At YouTube, we believe that everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share, and build community through our stories. We work together to give everyone the power to share their story, explore what they love, and connect with one another in the process. Working at the intersection of cutting-edge technology and boundless creativity, we move at the speed of culture with a shared goal to show people the world. We explore new ideas, solve real problems, and have fun and we do it all together.

Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

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.

The Short-form Video team owns everything from the mobile creation experience and related mobile effects (e.g., text, stickers, filters) , through a new video player experience that provides full screen videos with a quick tap to see the next videos, and through all the backend systems to allow creating and serving these videos and recommending them to users on home, search, and more.

Shorts exploration is a critical part of shorts recommendation with the mission to find an initial audience for fresh videos to enlarge our recommendable corpus and to inspire creation. We leverage various modeling techniques and signals to build initial audiences for fresh videos within the recommendation stack.

At YouTube, we believe that everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share, and build community through our stories. We work together to give everyone the power to share their story, explore what they love, and connect with one another in the process. Working at the intersection of cutting-edge technology and boundless creativity, we move at the speed of culture with a shared goal to show people the world. We explore new ideas, solve real problems, and have fun and we do it all together.

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

Learn more about benefits at Google .

• Contribute to personalized quality recommendations and help build and grow a promising new product within Google, focusing on the discovery/recommendation engine and LLM-based recommendation systems.
• Provide technical leadership on high-impact projects. Manage project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables.
• Facilitate alignment and clarity across teams on goals, outcomes, and timelines. Influence and coach a distributed team of engineers.
• Lead the design and implementation of solutions in specialized ML areas, optimize ML infrastructure, and guide the development of model optimization and data processing strategies.
• Design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, and enhance large scale software solutions.

Google is proud to be an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer. We are committed to building a workforce that is representative of the users we serve, creating a culture of belonging, and providing an equal employment opportunity regardless of race, creed, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition (including breastfeeding), expecting or parents-to-be, criminal histories consistent with legal requirements, or any other basis protected by law. See also Google's EEO Policy , Know your rights: workplace discrimination is illegal , Belonging at Google , and How we hire .

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