Staff Software Engineer, YouTube Shorts Creation Data, Metrics and Compute

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 technical expertise you will manage project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables. You will design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, and enhance software solutions.

As the Staff Software Engineer Tech Lead for Shorts Creation Data, Metrics and Compute, you will be the overarching technical lead responsible for the end-to-end data analytics architecture, metric standardization, and compute/TPU estimation frameworks across the entire Shorts Creation organization.

You will bridge client and server telemetry with enterprise-grade data warehousing and analytical self-service. You will lead the consolidation of fragmented pipelines into a single source of truth data warehouse. Crucially, you will own the software engineering frameworks and analytical models that connect creation funnel telemetry to TPU capacity estimations and compute optimization for YouTube’s Generative AI creation features.

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.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, implementation, and governance of consolidated production data warehouses and canonical data sources across Shorts Creation, MediaGen, Effects, YouTube and Create.
• Design and build scalable software tooling, telemetry pipelines, and analytical models to measure GenAI request funnels, latency/cancellation costs, and hardware utilization—directly informing organization-wide TPU capacity estimation and allocation decisions.
• Define and standardize canonical business logic, modular SQL libraries, and Table-Valued Functions that power Google-level Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), executive dashboards, and unified RASTA experimentation metrics.
• Collaborate closely with the Data and Metrics telemetry infrastructure lead and client/server feature teams to unify logging contracts across Sessions3, VAPI, and server-side DragonGlass logs.
• Serve as a standing lead on Design Review Committee, enforce production code health and testing standards across Software Engineers and Data Engineers, and drive the multi-year data roadmap.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in software development.
• Experience serving as a tech lead driving cross-organizational technical roadmaps across software engineering, product management, and data science teams.
• Experience designing and operating production-grade data warehouses, distributed data pipelines, and telemetry schemas using SQL, Python, C++, or Go, and Protocol Buffers.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
• Experience modeling and optimizing compute/hardware capacity (such as TPU/GPU resource estimation and inference funnel efficiency) for large-scale Generative AI media applications.
• Expertise in YouTube’s data and logging ecosystem (Sessions3, VAPI, conformed_video, ZugZug, Procella/F1, Plx workflows, and RASTA experimentation infrastructure).
• Track record of designing domain-specific developer tools or modular SQL frameworks (SQLM/TVFs) in Google3 that scale across multiple engineering and analytical teams.
• Demonstrated success governing production code quality, wipeout/privacy compliance, and automated CI/CD (Annealing) across cross-functional engineering teams.