Dean Schaffer Email & Phone Number

San Bruno, Ca, Us

Bringing generative AI to YouTube with Google DeepMind.

San Bruno, Ca, Us

I lead three engineering teams of ~30 engineers total in the YouTube Music Corpus team. Our mission is to organize and understand all the music on YouTube, and we power music experiences across YouTube and Google as a whole. I own the systems that publish official music to YouTube, organize music metadata, describe official and unofficial music using machine learning, and more.

Salt Lake City, Utah, Us

I led "Distribution," a vertically integrated, cross-functional team that included contributors from product, design, engineering, analytics, and machine learning. Our aggressive roadmap included projects around content consumption, engagement, curation, and sharing, plus notifications, recommendations, and more.Additionally, I...• Owned all licensing and royalties infrastructure, including usage tracking, royalties automation, and publisher data• Managed Smule's first all-offshore development team to ship business-critical projects that supported the legal, marketing, content, community, and business development teams• Converted broad goals, ambiguity, and sometimes conflicting directions into an actionable, achievable roadmapACCOMPLISHMENTS• Executed complete visual redesign of the Smule iOS app• Built curation tools that empowered the marketing and content teams to program localized content for users in different regions• Delivered Smule's first fully automated licensing and royalties infrastructure, expanding to millions of licenses with a small cross-functional team• Grew MAU to more than 50 million

Salt Lake City, Utah, Us

• Created Magic Piano Composer to allow millions of users of all musical skill levels to arrange songs for Magic Piano, which grew the number of songs in the app from several thousand to more than 1 million in less than a year• Redesigned Smule's new user onboarding flow to consider the user's preferences and demographic to better solve the "cold start" problem• Worked with the machine learning team to automatically classify Smule's user-generated songs into genres at scale• Executed major infrastructure migration to allow us to sunset legacy systems

Salt Lake City, Utah, Us

• Launched Smule's first user-facing song arrangement tool, which grew Smule's library from a U.S.-centric collection of a few thousand songs to a truly global catalog of more than 6 million songs that span languages and cultures• Released crowd-sourced curation system to regulate the quality of user-generated content• Overhauled licensing system to accommodate new higher volume of content

New York, New York, Us

• Managed Allvoices’ daily operations, content, product roadmap, community policies, and overall strategy• Ran development, editorial, and support teams• Grew direct monthly visits by 3x, traffic capacity by 7-8x, and annual revenue by 10x• Developed and launched new sponsored content product, which generated more than $1 million in revenue through partnerships with brands including Mercedes-Benz• Built and leveraged direct relationships with high-value, top-tier community members

• Owned several business-critical product lines of study materials for high school students• Created new product suite for SAT and AP prep, which are available on Amazon• Hired and managed a group of 10-12 expert writers each year• Met with teachers and schools to spread the company brand and solicit feedback

• Supervised, coordinated, hired, and trained the copy editing team of four• Edited copy for one newspaper each week, plus the paper’s weekly arts section

M.A., Communication -- Journalism

B.A., American Studies