I’m Gunning for L5 at Google. Here’s What I’ve Done — And I’m Not There Yet.

personal learnings

They tell you to “show impact”, “be more senior”, “align with your manager”.

Thanks. Very helpful.

I want to tell you what’s happening in my case right now.

The moves I’ve made, the bets I’ve taken, and the mistakes I needed to correct along the way.

I haven’t gotten the promotion yet.

But I’m deep in the process, and I think the story is more useful told from inside it than after the fact.

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The Starting Point: L3, Anti-Abuse, Getting Bored Fast

I joined Google as an L3. Within 1.5 years I made L4, working on anti-abuse ML systems: detection models, signal engineering, the unglamorous but technically interesting work of catching bad actors at scale.

And then I got bored.

That’s not something people admit in promotion posts.

But it matters. Because what you do when you’re bored determines whether you grow or stagnate.

In May 2024 I made a deliberate move: I transferred to YouTube Ads.

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The YouTube Ads Chapter: Grinding Toward L5

I write about ML systems in production — the tradeoffs, the architecture decisions, the stuff that doesn’t make it into papers. If you want to go deeper, the paid tier covers the technical (AND personal! like this one) details I can’t fit in free posts.