
Staff Software Engineering, YouTube ML Efficiency
Role summary
YouTube's Discovery Efficiency team is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to enhance the performance and efficiency of machine learning workloads powering YouTube. This role involves working at the intersection of modeling and efficiency, focusing on evolving YouTube's models for next-generation TPUs. Responsibilities include monitoring and prototyping recommendation system techniques, enabling new model architectures and training procedures, scaling experimentation, reducing ecosystem complexity with standardized solutions, and automating ML training, evaluation, and serving processes. The position requires a Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience, 8 years in software development, 5 years leading ML design and optimizing ML infrastructure, and 3 years building large-scale recommendation systems.
### Minimum qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
- 8 years of experience in software development.
- 5 years of experience leading ML design and optimizing ML infrastructure (e.g., model deployment, model evaluation, data processing, debugging, fine tuning).
- 3 years of building large-scale recommendation systems, Machine Learning (ML), ranking, or personalization.
### Preferred qualifications:
- Solid knowledge of ML models/algorithm design and implementation and their application to real-world problems.
- Ability to collaborate effectively across teams and functions.
- Strong problem solving and quantitative reasoning skills.
- Solid communication skills.
## 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 YouTube Discovery Efficiency team is responsible for improving performance and extracting maximum efficiency for machine learning and AI workloads that powers YouTube. In this role, you will work at the intersection of modeling and efficiency by helping evolve YouTube's models for next TPU generations.
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 $207,000-$300,000 + 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
- Monitor the evolving landscape of recommendation systems, actively prototyping and benchmarking emerging modeling techniques to keep our infrastructure cutting-edge and efficient.
- Enable next-generation model architectures and training procedures.
- Scale experimentation capacity under our resource envelope.
- Reduce complexity and fragmentation in the ML training and serving ecosystem by providing standardized, composable, and reusable solutions.
- Reduce experimenter toil through introduction of automation frameworks for training, evaluation, and model serving.
Google is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. See also Google's EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know by completing our Accommodations for Applicants form.
Sample Youtube interview questions
- 1
Create an instant communication platform.
system designmedium - 2
Rotate a linked list to the right by k places. Given the head of a linked list, rotate the list to the right by k places. Input: head = [0,1,2], k = 4 Output: [2,0,1] Explanation: The list has a length of 3. Rotating by 4 is mathematically equivalent to rotating by 1 (4 mod 3 = 1).
codingmedium - 3
Count Anagrammatic Substrings Count the number of anagrammatic substrings from one string present in another. Input: s = "abab", p = "ab" Output: [0, 1, 2] Explanation: The substrings "ab", "ba", and "ab" starting at indices 0, 1, and 2 respectively are all anagrams of the string "ab".
codingmedium - 4
Sort a String by Frequency Sort a string by the frequency of its characters. Input: s = "cccaaa" Output: "cccaaa" or "aaaccc" Explanation: Both 'c' and 'a' appear three times, so sorting them by descending frequency keeps them grouped equally.
codingmedium - 5
Palindromes in Base-10 and Base-k Return the first n integers that are palindromes in both base-10 and base-k. Input: n = 2, k = 4 Output: [1, 5] Explanation: 1 is '1' in base 4, and 5 is '11' in base 4. Both are perfect palindromes in decimal and base 4 simultaneously.
codingmedium
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