San Francisco office rides the wave

Posted by Todd Curtiss, Director of Engineering, Site Reliability (SRE)

San Francisco has been attracting freethinking writers, artists, instigators, and entrepreneurs for more than 150 years. The people who built, experienced, and created this diverse place have all shared a passion for innovation and extending beyond the conventional. San Franciscans kicked off the gold rush and made the first pair of jeans, received the first transcontinental telephone call in 1915, came together for the Summer of Love and the original Burning Man, and played a major role in the dot-com and Web 2.0 booms. The City always seems to blaze new trails.

Sure, our summers are cool and foggy, our hills are steep, and our streets are twisty. But SF Googlers think this is the perfect place to work. Earlier this year, our own "Father of the Internet" Vint Cerf launched the office by inspiring the assembled engineers to think about today's challenges at scale, speaking about the challenges of interplanetary IP communication, the future of the Internet, and who's to blame for IPv4's limited address space (Vint says it's him).

We in the SF office contribute to a broad cross-section of the Google world in a number of ways: we write software for managing big computing clusters and keeping them efficient; we analyze vast piles of data to understand how the web works; we engineer reliability, scalability, and security into the apps many people rely on; we share our tools and methods with the open source community; we create internal productivity apps to support our engineers.

And that's just in engineering. The SF office also supports ad agency customers, local markets and classifieds. We're home to our philanthropic arm Google.org, and we make time to participate in community volunteer programs through our employee-created Google Cares-SF program. We have an active green committee, access to the GFleet car-share program, and we're the first plastic-bottle–free office among all of the Googleplexes.

Here's what some of us have to say about working here:



While we may be new, Google SF is growing fast. With close proximity and access to Mountain View and the rest of the Silicon Valley, we span the best of worlds: local and global, campus and city, 'burbs and urban, highways and dirt roads. We're always looking for talented and passionate people to join our team, so if you want to be part of building the next big thing, we'd love to hear from you.

And in case you need another reason to come visit us in Shaky Town, Google I/O, our largest developer conference to date, takes place at the Moscone Center on May 28-29. It's not too late to register -- we hope to see you there.