Senior Staff Tech Lead, YouTube Shorts Discovery

Google•Mountain View, CA

4d•$262,000 - $364,000

About The Position

Google’s software engineers develop next-generation technologies that change how billions of users connect, explore, and interact with information. In this role, you will tech-lead a team of AI/ML software engineers to grow the YouTube Shorts ecosystem by recommending Shorts aligned with users’ dynamically changing interests. The discovery models are large-scale AI/ML systems that model user interests using Google-wide data sources, understand Shorts content, and recommend suitable content to viewers. They support multi-task learning across multiple surfaces and downstream tasks, including retrieval, user action prediction, rich user model generation, and knowledge distillation for training compact models. The role focuses on techniques including LLMs, generative retrieval, and long-sequence modeling to build foundational models for personalized retrieval and early-stage ranking. You will define technical strategy, lead development and deployment of recommendation systems, and partner across engineering, product, data-science, and research teams. Google describes its engineering environment as fast-paced, with opportunities to work on projects critical to the company’s needs.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
8 years of experience in software development.
7 years of experience leading technical project strategy, ML design, and working with industry-scale ML infrastructure, such as model deployment, model evaluation, data processing, debugging, and fine tuning.
5 years of experience with design and architecture, and testing and launching software products.
5 years of experience building and deploying recommendation system models (retrieval, prediction, ranking, embedding) in production, and experience building architecture in different modeling domains.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
8 years of industry experience working on AI/ML recommendations.
8 years of industry experience in the recommendations technology domain.
5 years of experience in a technical leadership role leading project teams and setting technical direction.
5 years of experience with one or more of the following: large-scale recommendation or search systems, reinforcement learning (e.g., sequential decision making), ML infrastructure, or specialization in another ML field.

Responsibilities

Define technical strategy for enhancing YouTube Shorts discovery models and systems to accelerate viewer and creator growth while improving user satisfaction.
Provide technical leadership on projects; design, develop, test, and deploy large-scale recommendation models and novel model architectures, and optimize ML infrastructure to drive growth of the Shorts ecosystem.
Partner with engineering, product, data-science, and research teams to turn business goals into scalable technical solutions that grow the Shorts ecosystem.
Facilitate alignment and clarity across teams on goals, prioritization, outcomes, and timelines.
Mentor and influence junior engineers to help uplevel the team.