# Mingyan Gao

> Principal Software Engineer at YouTube

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/mingyan

Extensive knowledge and experience in
- state-of-the-art large AI/ML recommendation systems
- building the 3-way flywheel in recommendation products
- digital ads eco-systems, from engineering, product to sales activation
- building ads targeting and bidding systems, and large-scale ads infrastructure for ads indexing and serving

## Work Experience
### Principal Software Engineer @ YouTube
Jan 2021 – Present
Uber Tech Lead for YouTube Shorts Discovery

- Responsible for Shorts growth and recommendation quality
- Grow the Shorts ecosystem through safely and responsibly enhancing viewership, creation and monetization capabilities 
- Design and build the state-of-the-art large AI/ML recommendation systems, both bottom up and via partnership with Google Deepmind research teams
- Previously TLM for Shorts Trends. Trends are shorts that share common media assets and creation concepts. Trends are engaging to users and inspire creations. They generate particular favorability among GenZ users. I led this 0 to 1 product in YouTube Shorts, designing and implementing the AI/ML systems to power the trends ecosystems.

### Senior Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead Manager @ Google
Jan 2012 – Jan 2021 | Mountain View, CA
Google Display Ads
- TLM for Display ads auto-targeting systems that power multi-billion dollar business
- Ads targeting algorithm design and quality enhancement
- Ads product analytics
- Large-scale ads infrastructure

### Doctor of Philosophy @ University of California, Irvine
Jan 2007 – Jan 2012 | Irvine, CA
My research interests included data management, heterogeneous spatio-temporal data stream processing, complex event processing and social computing. My Ph.D. dissertation was "EventShop: An Information Engine for Processing Heterogeneous Spatio-Temporal Data Streams". I designed and implemented the query algebra and the stream query processor, and applied the work on real-life and synthetic applications.

### Research Intern @ Microsoft Research Asia
Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 | Beijing, China
Designed and implemented a system that automatically recognizes life events through analyzing spatio-temporal and visual features associated with mobile pictures.

### Research Intern @ National University of Singapore
Jan 2008 – Jan 2008 | Singapore
Designed and implemented a composite event detector useful in smart communication project for decision making.

### Research Assistant @ Peking University
Jan 2004 – Jan 2006 | Beijing, China
Designed and implemented a web page crawler for collecting web pages from varieties of news sites and discussion forums.


## Education
### Ph.D. in Computer Science
UC Irvine

### Bachelor in Computer Science, (Double Major) Economy
Peking University

### The Experimental High School Attached to Beijing Normal University


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/mingyan-gao-69a6a7b

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Source: https://flows.cv/mingyan
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/mingyan/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12