Bilal Clarance: Technical Leader

July 12, 2024

Bilal Clarance: Technical Leader

Story by Mark Hornickel / photography by Todd Weddle

From the basketball court to some of the most recognized brand names in the tech industry, Bilal Clarance enjoys taking the lead.

Bilal Clarance '05 is taking a break between meetings in a "huddle room" he shares with another director at Google's Sunnyvale, California, campus. The room - which resembles a small living room with cushy furniture and a monitor hung on the wall over a credenza - neighbors an upper floor flank of the office building where Clarance's team assembles at a field of workstations.

A couple times a week - when he's not working in his office at home or another one of Google's satellite locations throughout the world - Clarance boards a Google bus at a stop near his Berkeley home and rides it to the Sunnyvale campus, just south of San Francisco. The bus works as a mobile office for Google employees, so he's already participated in a conference call, prepped for meetings and answered a slew of emails by the time he steps onto the campus.

His morning schedule included a lengthy meeting to discuss personnel and promotions. After lunch, he had a meet-and-greet with a Google leader, a meeting to receive an update on work his team is doing for the company's YouTube team and then another meet-and-greet with a company director. The last item scheduled for his workday was a deep dive with his team into an infrastructure project aimed at providing better reliability and data bandwidth to clients.

"I barely sit at that desk, because I'm mostly in meetings," he said, waving at his workstation beyond the huddle room. "But when I do, it's either checking emails or just reading because there's so much to learn. I'm reading up on things, tinkering with things, kind of educating myself on the Google ecosystem."

Ecosystem. Type that into a Google search and you'll get myriad results with links to definitions, YouTube videos and science-based websites. An Oxford Languages definition describes ecosystem as "a complex network or interconnected system," and a summary of a Wikipedia page describes a system where "biotic and abiotic components are linked together through nutrient cycles and energy flows."

As director of engineering for Google's graph serving team, Clarance is a driver of its ecosystem and the results of every Google search. In simple terms, his team is responsible for steering the data supplied to Google's Knowledge Graph, an information box displayed alongside search results. Clarance also deploys his experience in the data privacy governance space as a trust lead at Google, providing guidance on regulatory impacts and policy and security issues.

And yet, tech is a second career for Clarance, who began his professional life as a basketball player. As he turns 45 this year, he feels lucky to have found two careers matching his passions.

"The background I have, and the competencies that I bring with me, gives me an edge in a lot of ways," he said. "I know how to meet people where they are. Every person out there on the floor with me, they react to my leadership differently, and that's true in corporate life. You have to meet them where they are. What are the motivations? What are their fears? What are their ambitions? And then you have to treat them like individuals because if I treat everybody the same I'm not gonna get the best out of them."

DANISH BEGINNINGS

Clarance was born and raised in Copenhagen, Denmark, the son of a Danish mother and Caribbean father. He grew up bilingual and Muslim - a faith he continues practicing today - and, in doing so, gained an appreciation for different cultures.

He loved soccer, too, and worked jobs delivering newspapers, sorting recyclables at a grocery store and selling clothing at a department store to help pay for the costs of playing his chosen sport. But a growth spurt around age 14 turned him to basketball.

An invitation to try out for a basketball club set up Clarance for a kind of success he never anticipated. "There's a lot you can gain from soccer - angles, cutting, positioning, spacing, all that stuff - so that came sort of naturally," he said of his transition to basketball. "Setting plays came very naturally to me, but I was extremely raw."

Still, Clarance showed a tenacity and eagerness to learn. He made Denmark's U16 national team and was competing against some of the world's best basketball players, "beating folks that I have no business beating," he said. At 17, he made the roster of a semi-pro team in Denmark. He began to realize that perhaps he could make a living playing basketball and started the process of taking his game to America.

COMING TO AMERICA

During the early 2000s, the internet was still in its infancy, and highlight packages of amateur athletes were not yet being shared all over social media platforms. Clarance had to rely on building relationships.

For starters, he learned how to cut hair. Among his patrons was an opposing player whose brother-in-law was an assistant coach at Miles City Community College in Montana. At the other player's recommendation, Clarance sent a videotape with his highlights to the team's head coach, who was impressed and offered Clarance a full scholarship.

He had a successful first year at Miles City, averaging 14 points and earning all-conference honors. Although he attracted interest from a few Division I programs, Northwest entered as a potential suitor during his second season in Montana.

When he traveled to Maryville for a workout with the Bearcat men's basketball team in 2003, Clarance impressed the coaching staff enough to receive a scholarship offer to play at Northwest. But Clarance was quick with a counteroffer. He wanted to meet with an academic advisor before he committed.

While growing up in Denmark, he aced math but never thought about it as a potential career path. At Miles City, an instructor noticed his aptitude for it and suggested he enroll in a computer science course. "I took it and it blew my mind," he said. "I felt like I found something that I could be as passionate about as basketball. And so I was like, all right, this is what I want to do."

Clarance wanted to make sure Northwest could place him on a path to professional success outside of basketball. So Bearcat head coach Steve Tappmeyer set up a meeting for Clarance with Dr. Carol Spradling '88, a faculty member in the computer science department. During their initial conversation, Spradling offered guidance that fit his aspirations and candidly told him his status as a basketball player wouldn't provide him any leverage over other students in the classroom.

Clarance bought in and made Northwest his next home. Hands-on projects at the University, combined with internships at Cerner in Kansas City and a financial institution in Nebraska, furthered his interest in the software field and digital media. The logic of coding and problem-solving made sense to him and he found fulfillment in it.

"The euphoria there is real," he said. "But I think the notion that I'm literally creating an experience online - that was something that really resonated with me. … This is coming from a guy who never touched computer games - never touched computers, really. I was always out playing. As a child, I never owned a computer, a gaming console or anything like that."

PLAYING TIME

At the same time he was finding his niche in computer science, Clarance continued his basketball career, playing with the Bearcats during the 2003-04 and 2004-05 seasons. Among the achievements he is most proud of is that the 2003-04 Bearcat team was the first in school history to be ranked No. 1. That team also advanced to the NCAA Division II Elite Eight for just the second time in school history.

"It felt like we were competing for something," Clarance said. "It felt like a foundation had been laid … Because of the success of the program, we felt like we could realize the next step. We fell short, but it was a great experience."

Upon graduating from Northwest with his bachelor's degree in interactive digital media with a computer science emphasis, Clarance embarked on a professional basketball career with teams in Madrid and Germany, in addition to captaining the Danish national team. He took pride in his shooting ability and his role as a defensive stopper, a team player with a high IQ. Most of all, he took pride in being coachable and being a leader on the court.

But injuries also wore on him, and he understood he needed to prepare for life after his basketball career ended.

"I told myself, 'Look, at some point, this thing is not gonna bounce anymore. So you need to set yourself up for success once that happens,'" Clarance said. "That was basically the focus for me was to build up a résumé and the skillset that would allow me to go and transition successfully."

As Clarance continued honing his computer science skills, he started by assisting with his agent's website. He learned as many computing languages as he could and accepted freelance work, creating business websites. During a summer with the Danish national team, he secured a job in London, working it on weekdays and then flying back to Denmark for weekend basketball practices.

In 2009, Clarance retired from basketball. He married his longtime girlfriend, Dia McKee '06, who ran cross country and track at Northwest, and they made their home in California. Today, they have two sons, ages 10 and 12.

DEVELOPING AND ADVANCING

During three years in Los Angeles, Clarance started his post-basketball career as a software developer with a series of startup companies amid the initial boom in smartphone apps. Though working for smaller companies - for low pay with the constant threat of layoffs and uncertain leadership - yielded its own unique problems, Clarance took advantage of opportunities to develop his skill sets and learned how to navigate the computing field.

He built technology infrastructure at small companies, along with a network of peers that eventually got him to Silicon Valley. Clarance joined Apple in 2012 as a software engineer focused on its online store and mobile app and quickly became a productive part of the team. A year later - amid a company reorganization - another leader with the online store snatched Clarance to make him a lead software engineer with Apple's Retail Product Data team. The role afforded him opportunities for new work, additional responsibilities, and the freedom to take risks and try new things. It also allowed him an opportunity to gain managerial experience overseeing teams in India as well as in the San Francisco area.

He learned from the experience, particularly by stepping out from his role as an individual contributor and leading others.

"My leadership philosophy had already taken shape even without being in the capacity of a manager, and that comes from sports," Clarance said. "The things I learned on the basketball court translate really well to the work life. More people who have been in sports and have experience should be looked to be hired in the corporate world. I think the things we learned in team sports are absolutely critical, especially in positions of leadership."

THE NEXT PHASE

After a three-and-a-half-year stint with Capital One from 2019 to 2022, Clarance spotted an opportunity for advancement and transitioned to Google, where he assumed his current role leading a team that is perfecting the company's data engine - and driving new iterations of computing.

"That's probably what's most exciting to me right now about being at Google is this next phase of search or AI experiences," Clarance said. "I feel very privileged to be at the company that is a leader in the space and will shape the future of this stuff. Having a lens, quite honestly, on the trust and safety of that, I feel is a really important aspect of it. At Google, we need to get it right."

If you haven't read or seen the hype, AI - artificial intelligence - is the latest technological frontier being applied to tasks such as writing academic papers, summarizing lengthy service contracts and responding to customer complaints. Predictions indicate it will eventually factor into every industry. Google, of course, is in the thick of the race to develop it, investing billions of dollars into their data enterprise to populate AI tools.

While the benefits and advantages of AI technology are still being debated, Clarance is as interested as anyone in its potential.

"As people of the workforce, we need to figure out how to leverage this technology," Clarance said. "I think it's wrong to assume or come from a place of combating it or resisting it. It's here, it's gonna stay."

AI technology is expected to help employees shed mundane tasks to refocus on their specialties. Clarance envisions AI tools helping software engineers, for example, become better, more efficient developers. He also acknowledges questions related to how AI could impact society and the human race.

"I do think we have to be very conscious and careful about what effect this has on our kids, what effect this has on the polarization that is true around the world," he said. "I think, for the creators of this technology, there's a social responsibility that we have to take very seriously. … But do I think computers are taking over the world? No."

He added, "I think it's exciting. It's kind of like the ocean. It's fun, but you have to respect it. I think being in technology, you have to respect the opportunity and also make sure that you hold yourselves and people around you accountable and responsible."

LEADING THE WAY

Within the Google ecosystem the energy flows through office buildings outfitted with plant life, work pods and conference rooms furnished with large monitors, whiteboards, charging stations, sticky notes and every other office supply a "Googler" might need to fuel idea generation and collaboration. Meeting rooms are labeled with eco-friendly names, such as "Fishing at Sunset" and "Cloud Shadows."

"Google's an incredible place," he said. "The problems we're solving, the things we're trying to figure out, the challenges that we have - you don't get those sorts of problems and challenges in many places."

In an industry that evolves rapidly, Clarance will pass two years at Google this summer and continues seeking ways to enhance his skills, not just in software engineering but as a leader. He's proud of the career experience that's shaped him into a well-rounded leader, and he's proud to be a part of the engineering ethos at Google. He's also proud to be leading teams of people and helping them thrive - similar to the ways his coaches and teachers helped him, from Denmark to Northwest.

"I'm passionate about creating that environment for my people," he said. "The broader impact I have, the more people I can impact positively, and maybe more people will say, 'You know, when I worked with Bilal, I did some of the best work of my life.'"