Senior Director Engineering, YouTube Trust and Safety
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Minimum qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
- 15 years of experience in software development.
- 10 years of experience in team management.
- Experience with consumer-facing product engineering or ML/recommendations organizations.
Preferred qualifications:
- 20 years of experience in software development spanning a combination of infrastructure, mobile and web applications, and AI/ML.
- Experience driving execution with urgency.
- Experience in music, podcasts, or video streaming services.
- Experience handling incidents and escalations, highly skilled in problem solving under pressure and executions against deadlines.
- Ability to inspire and motivate the engineering team to work together as a cohesive and highly productive unit.
About the job
This role focuses on Detection Engineering and consists of approximately 200 software engineers across Zurich, San Bruno, and Mountain View.
The organization comprises two primary pillars:
Video Content Abuse: Focuses on detecting violative video content on the platform. The team (comprising ~90 engineers) leverages advanced ML architectures (such as multimodal representation topologies) and agentic workflows to increase recall and precision for video abuse classification.
Channel Abuse and GenAI Product Safety: Focuses on detecting violative channels, text abuse and securing Generative AI features via the YouTube Safety API (1pGenAI Safety). The team builds classifiers, automated prompt optimization frameworks, and multimodal protections to defend against adversarial creators and abuses such as hate speech, and harassment in text inputs and outputs. The team also builds APIs called by YouTube’s GenAI features to ensure the safety of the output.
As the Senior Director of Engineering for Trust and Safety, you will be responsible for end-to-end technical leadership and execution for the YouTube Trust & Safety’s Detection Engineering teams. In particular, you are responsible for making sure that Violative View Rate (VVR) and Adversarial View Rate (AVR) meet targets under the constraints that annual trust and safety operating expense are under budget.
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.
Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.US: $364000 - $505000 (USD) + 40% bonus target + equity + benefits
Learn more about benefits at Google.
Responsibilities
- Manage, grow, and inspire a global organization of around 200 software engineers across all aspects of the software stack. Develop leadership talent through effective mentoring, succession planning, and retention strategies.
- Set and drive the "big picture" strategy while providing detailed technical guidance on AI/ML and infrastructure. Oversee complex technical projects including the integration of GenAI models, the evolution of multimodal classification models, and first-party GenAI feature safety.
- Partner with internal stakeholders across YouTube, DeepMind, and Google Trust & Safety to design and deploy rigorous quantitative frameworks and scalable enforcement solutions.
- Handle urgent escalations and high-priority incidents, demonstrating high EQ and the technical depth to uncover root causes and solve complex problems under pressure.
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Google is a global company and, in order to facilitate efficient collaboration and communication globally, English proficiency is a requirement for all roles unless stated otherwise in the job posting.
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