Steel City? More like Tech City, these days. Google Pittsburgh's engineers and product managers have worked on Search, Ads, and Commerce products used by hundreds of millions of people, as well as core engineering infrastructure. And unlike some U.S. technology hubs, our city is both culturally rich and exceptionally livable.
We’re an engineering office, home to Developers, Systems Ops, and Product Managers.
We’ve worked on products including AdWords, AdSense, Android, Commerce and Search, as well as core Google engineering infrastructure and tools.
Our product launches have included Google Shopping, Sky Map and Computer Vision for Android, the technology behind Face Unlock.
Number of Pittsburgh Googlers: Fewer than the number of Spartans at Thermopylae
Some of our conference rooms are named: Smithfield, Exterminator, Nilla Wafers
Distance to Carnegie Mellon, in driving minutes: 8
Google Pittsburgh
6425 Penn Avenue
Suite 700
Pittsburgh, PA 15206
Phone: (412) 345-6700
Want to tackle complex problems and build products used by hundreds of millions of people? At Google Pittsburgh, we’re helping shape some of Google’s most important engineering initiatives, from Shopping to Search to Android.
Our Engineers and Product Managers are experts in machine learning, computer systems, voice recognition, computer vision and robotics. We’ve got projects involving everything from intense parallel computing and massively-scaled systems infrastructure to system design and UI implementation. You may have seen some of our work as part of AdSense and AdWords or Google Shopping. And Sky Map was downloaded more than 20 million times before we open-sourced it and handed it over to Carnegie Mellon for future development.
We’re located in a renovated Nabisco factory in Bakery Square, a new mixed-use space in East Liberty, just minutes from Pitt and Carnegie Mellon. We believe we’re the perfect size for a Google office – big enough to drive major projects, but small enough that everyone knows everyone else.
When we’re not in meetings or writing code n’at, we have fun by playing music and having office-wide trivia contests, as well as playing pinball, pool and board games, or relaxing with a chair massage or in our giant hammock. And our replica Kennywood Amusement Park roller coaster car and murals of iconic local scenes give us a distinctly Steel City feel.
The people here like to solve challenging problems. We build complex, innovative technologies that touch hundreds of millions of users.
- Andrew Moore, VP of Engineering
Only in old books and movies. Back in the day, this was a steel town, known for its smokestacks and smelters. Today, it’s a technology hotbed, a model for cities trying to transition from an industrial past to a knowledge-based future. Home to Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, the ’Burgh produces some of the finest engineering talent in the world. It’s also one of the most livable places in the U.S. Don’t take our word for it, though. Ask Forbes and the Economist.
We have focused primarily on Ads, Commerce and infrastructure. Our Ads Quality team improves, expands and supports one of the world’s largest machine learning deployments. Our Ads UI team integrates advertiser input with Google's web corpus to create new, more useful ad formats. Our Commerce team, which developed Shopping, makes shopping more convenient and fun. That makes for some large engineering challenges, like building computer vision technology and mining all that’s for sale in the world. And our infrastructure team works on projects that make Google engineers around the world more productive. We make it easier to write stable, understandable code by providing the core libraries that engineers use every day, and make it easy for engineers to understand the behavior of code and debug problems that arise in the wild.
It varies a bit depending on what you ultimately work on, but generally, Pittsburgh Googlers have to be pretty versatile. We want computer scientists that love working at many levels of the software stack simultaneously. Having significant experience with C++ or Java coding and scripting is important to be able to build at scale, and we always look to add to our cache of experts in machine learning, data mining, computer vision and natural language processing. If you want to work on front-end products, you’ll need a deep understanding of Javascript, Java, HTML and CSS. And we also need people with experience developing beautiful user experiences for iOS and Android. For those working on our backend systems, we look for people with strong analytical and communications skills who have experience with aspects of running web services at scale. Typically, depth in either networking technologies or Unix system calls is a strong plus.
Design-wise, our office includes a gorgeous deck overlooking the city, a giant hammock we call “the trapeze net” and more than a few nods to our location’s industrial past, including a faded Google logo on the brick wall in reception, a conference room inside a chimney and murals of a railroad bridge and the city skyline. We have a music room, a pool table, a foosball table and vintage pinball machines. We plan monthly social excursions to do things like visit the local observatory or go ice skating, and are seriously into board games. And we still have the very first snack we purchased for our micro-kitchen, a cereal bar in the original wrapper. Oh, and we have an ongoing friendly rivalry with Google Boston.
Lots. Our site director, Andrew Moore, a Google VP and former Carnegie Mellon professor of computer science and robotics, is known for his work in areas like artificial intelligence data mining and machine learning. Software engineer Peter Dibble wrote or co-wrote The Real-Time Specification for Java and RTSJ Platform Programming, as well as several books on OS-9. And software engineer Sam Harbison wrote or co-wrote C: A Reference Manual, Modula-3 and C.mmp/Hydra: An Experimental Computer System. And that’s just to name a few.
We have an especially deep relationship with Carnegie Mellon (CMU), co-hosting seminars with the university, running shuttle buses to CMU for Googlers teaching or participating in events on campus and hosting CMU students in our office a couple of times a month. CMU students got pretty heavily involved in developing Sky Map once it was an open source project. We also do outreach to K-12 students in the community, bringing students into the office and hosting a weeklong Women in Engineering program for girls who want to get into computer science. For GoogleServe, we teach at local nonprofits as well as work with local Girl and Boy Scout troops to beautify public spaces. And we host local developers for a live, interactive stream of Google I/O.
