Roles in Engineering Productivity

In EngProd we have the same Google values around growth, development, and mentoring. As an EngProd Googler you have flexibility in choosing what to work on. You will learn about testable and maintainable systems as well as sustainable engineering practices. You will also develop your communication, collaboration, and leadership skills. What you do with these skills will be up to you! There are significant growth opportunities and paths within EngProd, similar to other engineering roles at Google.

Imagine you develop a small mobile app in your spare time. When you add a new feature to that app, the stages of engineering are all pretty easy: design, code, test, debug, release. Your system is well understood and tractable.

Contrast this to working on a large system at Google that supports billions of users and millions of queries per second. Several thousand engineers make thousands of changes per day and asynchronously release various parts of the system. It is likely impossible for a single engineer to know every aspect of the system.

Let’s re-examine the development process in this situation. Design and coding, of course, come first. Where the rubber really meets the road is in the testing and debugging stage, where you see if your change works as expected. Reasoning about the correctness of your change is now much more difficult.

Some questions come up, including: How do you make sure your change works? How do you make sure your change didn’t break an obscure use case for a user in a different geography? How do you prepare your change such that the next 100 engineers that modify the system don’t break the feature you just added?

These are complex problems that require tooling and infrastructure to help engineers reason about the correctness of their change. EngProd’s purpose is to make engineering easier and better, so we spend a lot of time on the hardest part of the process: building tools and infrastructure to make testing and debugging simpler.

Engineering Productivity at Google is unique for many reasons. Among them are:

• We hire world-class engineers who are passionate about excellence in engineering and product, delivering with high velocity to our users.
• There is significant autonomy to choose problems and how to solve those problems — at Google scale.
• Innovation and collaboration are core to EngProd (and Google), with opportunities to not only lead at Google, but to also build for everyone.
• Our long term goal is to change the way software is developed — not just here, but for all developers.

Yes! We also hire Technical Program Managers, Release Engineers, Network Test Engineers, Hardware Engineers, and many more roles.

See what interviews are like at Google on our How we hire page.