Google Student Blog: New Graduate Job Opportunity - Google's Internal Technology Residency Program

Student Blog

Brought to you from your @GoogleStudents friends. From pre-university to PhD (and beyond), we got you.

New Graduate Job Opportunity - Google's Internal Technology Residency Program

February 25, 2010

At Google, we rely on an internal technical support team that keeps Google running, robust and secure. Their objective is to create solutions and provide technical support to help Googlers be more efficient and keep them up to date with technological advances. Sound like something you're passionate about? Read on!
As part of our commitment to hire and develop top talent, Google has created the Internal Technology Residency Program for recent and experienced university graduates. Residents will learn what it takes to support and scale Google’s internal technology from our infrastructure to the end user. Combining classroom style training and mentorship, hands-on support and travel to awesome Google offices across the world, this program has it all.

Interested in learning more about what it's like to be a part of Google's Internal Technology Residency Program? Google for Students sat down with Nimit and Ayka, Corporate Operations Engineers, to find out what it's all about.

First, let's get some stats. Office:

Nimit: Mountain View, California
Ayka: Irvine, California
Education:
Nimit: BS in Business Administration with a focus in Management Information Systems from San Jose State University
Ayka: BS in Information Systems and Computer Science from University of Texas in Arlington
Time at Google:
Nimit: 4 1/2 years
Ayka: It will be 2 awesome years in March since I started at Google.

What team/project do you work on?
Nimit: I am one the managers of our font-line IT support team. This team assists Googlers with issues ranging from basic troubleshooting to developing applications that both scale and improve efficiencies within IT support. I have also worked on several operations projects such as our remote access infrastructure, developing several tools for our transportation teams, building out new Google offices and helping to integrate IT systems from Mergers and Acquisitions.
Ayka: Besides working with Googlers on their support issues as a field tech, I'm also involved in several projects with teams inside and outside of our organization. Some of the projects I've been working on with other members of our organization: coordinating security rollouts at Google, tech support tool based on Google chat, IT related policy reviews and rollouts, helping with improvements to our internal ticketing system, local office server room improvements and maintenance.

What is your favorite part about your job?
Nimit: I would say working with the people at Google is what I love the most. Working with some of the smartest people and teams from around the world across all departments and solving complex and challenging problems that have not been seen before is truly an exciting experience. We have a direct impact on Google by making Googlers more efficient and by keeping our internal systems running and operating. 4 1/2 years later I am still learning something new every day.
Ayka: Interfacing with a lot of very smart people and learning something new every day. Being in Corporate Engineering also puts us in a unique situation to work with teams outside of our organization. It's not uncommon for us to find out about something cool or new coming down the pipelines before anyone else in the company does.

What is the day to day like as someone in your role?
Nimit: There is never a dull moment. We are constantly innovating as a company and one of the great things is we get to try out new products first and help give feedback to the Engineers to make the product better. I could be working on fixing a network problem in Mountain View one day and then flying out to support an office build out or Enterprise Deployment in Europe the next. Being on the front lines of support you get to interact with a diverse cross-section of the company. Throughout the course of a day I might help people solve problems from our Sales department, our finance teams, or one of our many engineering teams (mobile, maps, search). We hire some of the most talented engineers, so we make sure to support them with an equally talented IT support organization.
Ayka: The primary function is to handle our users' support issues, which can range from something very simple to something complex that takes up most of the day. In between support tasks, I also try to find the time to improve our local IT infrastructure (proactive support work for the local office, server room improvements, TechStop re-design/improvements, etc), and work on various projects that I've picked up.

Any other information you'd like to share with the student audience about the ITRP job :)?
Nimit: If you love IT and being on the cutting edge of technology while connecting the world together and meeting new people, this is the job for you! It's a great opportunity to grow professionally within general IT support, IT management or even as a springboard into other groups across the company like networking, telephony, enterprise or mobile operations. I absolutely love being here. It's like the tech version of Disneyland.
Ayka: IT support at Google is very different from what you would find at other companies. You can sometimes spend a day doing something fairly simple but overall you'll get to work on issues that are not very common. An average Googler is going to be more tech savvy than your usual user so the problems you encounter will be a little more exciting. Having a very diverse platform base also adds to the non-conventional IT support environment - you're guaranteed to work on Macs, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, and mobile platforms.