Life’s good at Google Belo Horizonte. Our city is known for its architecture, sense of tradition, night-life with thousands (that’s right, thousands!) of pleasant and surprising pubs, proximity to nature and passion for the outdoors. Home to Googlers from around the world, we work on projects at the very core of Google’s mission.
We were named the best place to work in Brazil by the Great Place to Work Institute in 2010 and 2011.
We’re an engineering office developing Search and Social products.
We also develop and maintain local Maps products.
Number of Belo Horizonte Googlers: About the same as the number of zeros in a googol
Some of our conference rooms are named: Mantiqueira, Ouro Branco, Caparaó
National ping-pong champions on staff: 2
Avenida Bias Fortes
382 - Lourdes
Belo Horizonte - MG
30170-010, Brazil
Phone: +55 31 2128-6800
If you’re a curious, proactive engineer, you probably want to do more than tweak software for local markets or support local infrastructure. You probably want to work on big projects affecting hundreds of millions of users around the world. Like we do at Google Beagá.
Our engineers develop Search and Social products for global markets. Our work in Search is on core search technology, which lies at Google’s center of gravity. We’ve worked on an important AdSense product that delivers social ads across Google’s content network. And we’ve developed Social products including Orkut, which is hugely popular in Brazil, as well as preventing user misconduct on Google+. We’ve also done Maps work for Latin American markets.
Surrounded by spectacular mountains dotted with picturesque, historic towns and cities, our city is called “beautiful horizon” for good reason. Our Googlers come from across the country and around the world, giving our office a distinctly international feel. At any given moment, you can hear Portuguese, Spanish, Hindi, Dutch, German or Chinese – sometimes at the same time! And we bring passion to everything we do. Just ask anybody who uses our ping-pong or pebolim tables.
Interested in organizing the world’s information and making it more universally accessible and useful? Get in touch.
Some companies value discipline, execution and conformity. We value inventiveness and initiative.
- Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, Engineering Director
This is an engineering office, with a small number of Googlers in other areas like people operations. Our two biggest engineering teams are in Search and Social. Our work in Search is on core search technology, which lies at Google’s center of gravity. In Social, we run Orkut, which is very popular here in Brazil, and work on keeping Google+ free of abuse and misconduct. We also have a smaller group developing and maintaining Maps products for Latin America.
One example relates to Search. We figured out how to optimize Search to return better query results to speakers of different languages. What we started has launched for 40 languages around the world.
We’ve the opportunity to make an impact from the time we were Nooglers. In fact, we’re encouraged to identify and act on opportunities. We work on products used by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Because of our size and our friendliness, we have a real family feel. And we get to live in a clean, affordable, pretty and culturally vibrant place with great weather and short commutes. Yes, it’s as nice as it sounds!
We have parties to celebrate local holidays, with music by our office chorinho band. We go on awesome off-sites. We play pebolim, ping pong, pool and Guitar Hero, or relax in our bean bag chairs or hammocks. Outside work, we get together to play soccer and volleyball, go hiking, biking and climbing, visit nearby historic and colonial towns like Ouro Preto and enjoy our city’s delicious food and famous nightlife – the bar scene is unmatched.
With the developer relations team in Sao Paulo, we take part in local developer events throughout Latin America. We speak at local high schools and universities. We bring local students into the office, and sponsor a number of conferences with the Brazilian Computer Society.
Through GoogleServe, we do things like clean public squares, paint schools and teach kids and their teachers about technology. We’re also launching a Google Grants program in 2012, which gives nonprofits free AdWords advertising to help them grow fundraising and educational outreach.
Our site director, Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, co-wrote Modern Information Retrieval, which was published originally in 1999 and is one of the most cited computer science books ever. The second edition, whose contents is 75% new, was published in early 2011 and contains references to 1,800 other publications.
