Sarah E. Clatterbuck - Technical & Business Advisory, Board Member, Speaker

Yahoo!

At Yahoo! I worked on two major projects. First, the full re-write of the Yahoo! Groups product into a modern three-tier web app. During this time, I led the front-end team, which worked in PHP and Javascript.

The second project I worked on at Yahoo! was the Universal Header and Universal Widgets project. We built a distributed, in-memory cache that could be served in a multi-tenant environment to all of Yahoo!'s properties. A single server instance could handle 17k requests/second. The product consisted of a C++ client that allowed per-server configuration to sync the front-end code from a central publishing system. The publishing system enabled managemment of over 65,000 permutations of front-end code display. The client supported C++ and PHP wrappers as well as an XHR interface for Yahoo's properties to embed the front-end code. This trojan-horse like project allowed us inject code from the central publishing system. One cool thing we were able to deliver was a temporary time-based takeover of all US Yahoo! properties to memorialize the 10 year anniversary of 9-11. Demos of the header and memorial below.

At LinkedIn, I led the front-end teams responsible for monetized products. I personally built a "warm leads" widget that was a precursor for Sales Navigator. Later, I led the front-end team that built out Sales Navigator as a product as well as the first version of Sponsored posts. Our teams also worked on the front-ends for Recruiter, Jobs, Company Pages, Susbscriptions and Payments.

My second tour of duty at LinkedIn was leading teams working on client infrastructure. We worked on libraries and frameworks for web and mobile developers. Our teams contributed to various open source projects like Dust and Ember. I personally contributed a Math helper to Dust. During this time, we completely revamped the Ember build system as well as template rendering system. I led a project to performance tune the new version of the LinkedIn Feed and web/mobile web apps, which lasted 12 weeks and involved 150 developers from around the company. We were able to double the loading speed of the app before launch. I reported status weekly to the CEO and Engineering executive teams.

Overview of Project and Methodology

YouTube/Google

I joined YouTube in 2018 to lead engineering teams working on "Alternative Monetization" across Zurich and the US. This Creator Economy project sought to diversify income streams for YouTube Creators beyond existing rev-share models. During this time, we launched Channel Memberships to the market. We encountered interesting technical challenges around supporting creators with large subscriber bases in YouTube Studio. We also created a path for our most successful feature - Paygated Content, to be surfaced in search and discovery systems. I inherited a moderately successful business for Movies and Shows and grew it from XXM to XXXM. We launched together with teams in San Bruno the first version of premium channels. I onboarded an acquisition that then became a product for Brand Deals called Brand Connect. We built a new team to support the development and launch of Creator Merch and finally integrated together Paid Digital Goods and Channel Memberships into a Fan Funding effort as I was moving to my second tour of duty. Overall, these new and existing business lines added over $1B ARR to the top line during my tenure with the teams.

At the beginnig of the pandemic in early 2020, I stepped into the role of Zurich site lead as an elected representative for executive leadership in our 5000+ employee site. I remained in that role until my departure from Google in late 2025.

After my first tour of duty with Alternative Monetization, YouTube decided to go big on Shopping for which I became the founding executive, leading Engineering and PMO, but also sometimes product during my tenure. We took the small team that built Creator Merch as a foundational effort to build on. We decided to expand our Merch concept to include support for real creator products sold through Shopify and similar e-commerce platforms. Additionally, we pursued what we knew was a larger opportunity around creators promoting products for a commission. This eventually led to our YouTube Affiliate program launch, which started in the US and South Korea. The concept quickly grew and we expanded to all of Southeast Asia, India, Greater China and Brazil. Japan launched in the beginning of 2026, the groundwork laid during my tenure. The business grew from zero to multi-billion in GMV before my departure. I led teams across the US, Zurich and India, including onboarding the Simsim acquisition as part of the build out of the India technical efforts. Technical projects of interest were around novel discovery patterns for Shoppable Shorts, Classification of videos as Shopping facilitating, AI Products in video detection, In-app checkout, and improvements to Google Shopping catalog quality in APAC. A lot of net-new merchant infrastructure was built out in YouTube to support the Affiliate program and associated commissions.

Sarah E. Clatterbuck - Engineering Work

Yahoo!

LinkedIn

YouTube/Google