Staff Software Engineer, YouTube Shorts and Ads Formats

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.

YouTube Shorts is the fastest growing YouTube experience, reaching daily views across multiple channels (e.g., mobile, living room, desktop). business generating Shorts is critical to allow us to pay out a new generation of creators who power the new Shorts ecosystem. The YouTube Ads team is a new surface by building new ads formats and AI applications that feel native and less disruptive to users while delivering performance and value to our advertisers. In 2025, such innovations in our Shorts ads formats catalyzed over a 15% Year over Year (YoY) increase in Shorts ads growth. From a company level, your work will directly contribute to building a successful Shorts Ads product and affect our business generation roadmap for the future.Google Ads is helping power the open internet with the best technology that connects and creates value for people, publishers, advertisers, and Google. We’re made up of multiple teams, building Google’s Advertising products including search, display, shopping, travel and video advertising, as well as analytics. Our teams create trusted experiences between people and businesses with useful ads. We help grow businesses of all sizes from small businesses, to large brands, to YouTube creators, with effective advertiser tools that deliver measurable results. We also enable Google to engage with customers at scale.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate cross-functionally to shape the product strategy and roadmap in partnership with partner teams, such as the Program Manager (PM) and UX teams.
• Mentor and lead a group of engineers to execute the roadmap while maintaining high technical excellence.
• Utilize strong and fast experimentation skills to quickly understand user needs and identify new UI/format opportunities with business impact.
• Contribute to developing a unified format serving architecture to guarantee a consistent user experience across product types and devices.
• Establish foundational framework solutions that enable innovating formats with deeper user learning and a profound comprehension of our users.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in software development.
  
• 5 years of experience testing, and launching software products.
  
• 5 years of experience with full stack development, across back-end such as Java, Python, Golang, or C++ codebases, and front-end experience including JavaScript or TypeScript, HTML, CSS or equivalent.
• 3 years of experience with software design and architecture.

Preferred qualifications:

• 8 years of experience with data structures and algorithms.
• 3 years of experience in a technical leadership role leading project teams and setting technical direction.
  
• 3 years of experience working in a complex organization involving cross-functional, or cross-business projects.
• Experience in developing and implementing model-based solutions for user experience optimization.
  
• Experience in mobile app development and Android apps.