Inside Google's Engineering Culture: Part 1
A broad and deep dive in how Google works, from the perspective of SWEs and eng managers. What makes Google special from an engineering point of view, engineering roles, compensation, and more
Today, the tech giant Google reaches more people with its products than any other business in the world across all industries, via the likes of Google Search, Android, Chrome, Gmail, and more. It also operates the world’s most-visited website, and the second most-visited one, too: YouTube. Founded in 1998, Google generated the single largest profit ($115B after all costs and taxes) of all companies globally, last year.
Aside from its size, Google is known for its engineering-first culture, and for having a high recruitment bar for software engineers who, in return, get a lot of autonomy and enjoy good terms and conditions. Employees are known as “Googlers,” and new joiners – “Nooglers” – get fun swag when they start. An atmosphere of playful intellectual curiosity is encouraged in the workplace, referred to internally as “Googleyness” – more on which, later. This culture is a major differentiator from other Big Tech workplaces.
But what is it really like to work at Google? What’s the culture like, how are things organized, how do teams get things done – and how different is Google from any other massive tech business, truly?
This article is a “things I wish I’d known about Google before joining as an SWE / engineering manager”. It’s for anyone who wants to work at Google, and is also a way to learn, understand, and perhaps get inspired by approaches that work for one of the world’s leading companies.
This mini-series of articles focusing on Google contains more information about more aspects of its engineering culture than has been published in one place before, I believe. We’ve spent close to 12 months researching it, including having conversations with 25 current and former engineering leaders and software engineers at Google; the majority of whom are at Staff (L6) level or above.
Of course, it’s impossible to capture every detail of a place with more than 60,000 software engineers, and whose product areas (Google’s version of orgs) and teams work in different ways. Google gives a lot of freedom to engineers and teams to decide how they operate, and while we cannot cover all that variety, we aim to provide a practical, helpful overview.
In part 1 of this mini-series, we cover:
Overview. Google generates more revenue than Microsoft and Meta, and is the Big Tech giant that likely employs the most software engineers across 25+ engineering offices. The mission statement is to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
What makes Google special? Behind the variety of approaches to work is a universal engineering culture for tools and practices. Google has a unique, custom engineering stack, and has built systems differently from competitors since day one, making it a “tech island”. Google has historically been more open than other Big Tech companies about its inner workings. With 120+ active products, it is most similar to Microsoft in the breadth of work it does, and in the opportunities there are for software engineers to work on different things.
Levels and roles. There’s a dual-track career ladder between levels L2 and L11, and a Tech Lead Manager (TLM) role as a “third career path”. Google’s leveling process during interviews is the strictest in the industry, and “tech lead” is a role, not a level. Other engineering roles include SRE, EngProd, Research Scientist, DevRel, and UXE. Other roles that interact with engineering include Product Managers, Program Managers, TPMs, designers, and tech writers.
Compensation. Google pays at the top of regional markets, and is known for its standout compensation which includes base pay, equity, cash bonus, and sometimes a signing-on bonus. Examples of this top-of-market pay:
Mid-level engineer (L4) usually pays in the range of:
$250-350K in total compensation in the US
Other regions: £125-185K in the UK, €140-180K in Germany, CHF 210-260K in Switzerland, CA$210-280K in Canada, A$200-280K in Australia, zł380-450K in Poland, and ₹65-88 lakh in India
Staff software engineer (L6) usually pays in the range of:
$550-700K in total compensation in the US
Other regions: £270-380K in the UK, €250-330K in Germany, CHF 370-500K in Switzerland, CA$420-650K in Canada, A$350-550K in Australia, zł750-850K in Poland, and ₹1.5-2.2 crore in India
We cover entry-level (L3), senior (L5), senior staff (L7) packages, and also Google-specific bonuses like peer bonuses, spot bonuses, and award programmes.
Google is one of few companies to offer a financially rewarding career path for engineers which doesn’t push them into management
Hiring. Google has a notoriously difficult interview process which is copied by many other tech companies. Data structures and algorithms interviews, system design, “Googleyness”, and leadership interviews are also features of recruitment, and some teams use domain deepdives and takehomes. Final recruitment decisions are made by a Hiring Committee, but that’s still not the end of the process – successful candidates then go through “team matching”.
In Part 2, we additionally cover:
Planet-scale infra. Google’s internal infrastructure was built for ‘planet-scale’ by default, but Google Cloud does not support this out of the box; hence, most engineering teams build on Google’s PROD stack, not GCP.
Monorepo. Also known as “Google3,” 95% of all Google’s code is stored in one giant repository that has billions of lines. Trunk-based development is the norm. Also, the monorepo doesn’t mean Google has a monolithic codebase.
Tech stack. C++, Kotlin, Java, Python, Go, and TypeScript are officially supported, with heavy use of Protobuf and Stubby. Google has language style guides for most languages that are almost always enforced.
Dev tooling. A different dev tool stack from any other workplace. Goodbye GitHub, Jenkins, VS Code, and other well-known tools: hello Piper, Fig, Critique, Blaze, Cider, Tricorder, Rosie, and more.
Compute and storage. Borg, Omega, Kubernetes, BNS, Borgmon, Monarch, Viceroy, Analog, Sigma, BigQuery, Bigtable, Spanner, Vitess, Dremel, F1, Mesa, GTape, and many other custom systems Google runs on. This infra stack is unlike anywhere else’s.
AI. Gemini is integrated inside developer tools and most internal tools – and Google is heavily incentivizing teams to build AI whenever possible. Teams can request GPU resources for fine tuning models, and there’s a pile of internal GenAI projects.
This article is around twice as long as most deepdives; there are just so many details worth sharing about Google!
For similar deepdives, see Inside Meta’s engineering culture, Inside Amazon’s engineering culture, and other engineering culture deepdives — including that of OpenAI, Stripe and Figma.
Programming note: this week, an episode of The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast will be released tomorrow (Wednesday), and there will be no edition of The Pulse.
1. Overview
Let’s begin with a quick rundown of the numbers that give Google the most users and customers of any business, globally:
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