Principal Engineer, YouTube Shorts, Viewer Feed Quality

The Viewer Growth team within the Shorts Discovery organization aims at bringing step-changes in the viewer Shorts recommendations through improved understanding of users’ interests, preferences, and behavior patterns, leveraging advanced AI/ML technology.

As a Principal Engineer, you will drive a global impact for YouTube by leading the technical strategy for viewership growth and building high quality feeds based on user interests. You will help define reliable viewer metrics that guide launch decisions across the teams and modeling and infrastructure choices to make the feed highly responsive based on viewer interests and intents.

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.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $307,000-$427,000 + bonus + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.

Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits. Learn more about benefits at Google.

Responsibilities

• Partner with the Engineering Director to set and execute against the technical outlook to deliver against our time-sensitive multiyear product growth strategy and roadmap, balancing short- and long-term priorities against business needs. 
• Address high-dimensional machine learning challenges, including modeling sparse and complex survey responses. 
• Dive into deep engagement signals and build algorithms and infrastructure for integrating user interests and a real-time responsive recommendation stack.
• Collaborate with technical leads on other cross-functional teams (CoreX, Gemini/Research, YouTube Data, and Machine Learning Infrastructure) to integrate next-gen infrastructure and generative AI capabilities that improve the user and content understanding and responsiveness of the retrieval and ranking systems.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience.
• 15 years of experience in engineering.
• Experience with cross-functional technical innovation.

Preferred qualifications:

• 7 years of experience in a technical leadership role responsible for multiple technical areas and setting technical direction.
• Deep expertise in large-scale recommendation systems (retrieval/ranking), generative AI for content understanding, and machine learning infrastructure.
• Ability to manage multiple complex assignments simultaneously and work with geographically dispersed, cross-functional teams.