The Smokejumpers: Scaling Gemini’s serving infrastructure

Host Logan Kilpatrick sits down with Ema Taropa, lead of the "Smokejumpers" team, to discuss the infrastructure and serving work behind Gemini. They dive into what it actually takes to serve models to billions of users, why there is no "easy button" for global scaling, and how the team manages the trade-offs between latency, capacity, and cost. Their conversation covers the origins of the Smokejumpers team, Google’s vertically integrated TPU strategy, and the high-intensity culture of shipping Gemini 3.0. Learn more about the technical challenges of LLM caching and the human stories behind the engineers keeping Google's AI systems running 24/7. Listen to this podcast: Apple Podcasts → https://goo.gle/3Bm7QzQ Spotify → https://goo.gle/3ZL3ADl Chapters: 0:00 - Intro 1:34 - Scaling distributed systems for Gemini 3:43 - The Smokejumpers team infrastructure 9:33 - Refining model launch strategies 10:30 - Infrastructure trade-offs and global capacity 13:01 - The difficulty of LLM caching 15:09 - Google’s TPU strategy 16:04 - Esprit de corps and collaborative culture 18:01 - Context windows and workspace embeddings 18:14 - The human element of engineering teams 23:16 - Performance and efficiency of Gemini Flash 24:59 - Conclusion Watch more Release Notes → https://goo.gle/4njokfg Subscribe to Google for Developers → https://goo.gle/developers Speaker: Logan Kilpatrick, Ema Taropa Products Mentioned: Google AI, Gemini