Our goal is to accelerate the invention and deployment of new technologies, looking beyond current products, to the next generation of hardware and software systems.

The tagline is "Move forward farther, faster." We are here to accelerate the pace of systems (Platforms, Storage, Networking, etc.) at Google. In some ways, this is an exercise in time travel; We scout territory ahead of the product development. Our job is to imagine a technologically plausible future — one that is strategically important — and to create an approximation of that out of tech that already exists. Systems research is a constructive art. It’s about formulating new designs, concepts, architectures, and systems… And you have to build them to a degree to fully understand them.

Our ability to influence the future of the hyperscale computer system that Google will deploy five to ten years from now.

One advantage Google has is that it is both horizontal and vertical. Google is discovering both vertical opportunities (specialization) and horizontal opportunities (generalization). Google’s innovation came with this vertical integration, at scale. You have all these layers that reach people around the world and you have large projects at each of the layers. The tech challenges manifest themselves every day at Google. Secondly, Google is progressive in its role at societal challenges. To achieve what Google has done in sustainability — to operate net zero on renewable sources, to get to the stated goal of 24/7 carbon-free energy — is a fundamental technological challenge. This is not only important for Google but also allows others to figure out how to do it for themselves.

If you work in computer systems, it can be difficult to fully understand cloud computing unless you see it from the inside. The real-world requirements of global scale, extreme reliability, fault tolerance, security and privacy, plus the exponential growth of data and demand for machine learning ... That’s really unique and amazing to see close up.

I realized that there are really only two ways to have an impact in this next stage of my life: Either you go the startup route, where you fundamentally change the rules, or you work at one of the very few companies that essentially touch the whole world’s population.

The scale and variety of tech that’s being developed. We have everything from Pixel and Chromebooks to the global infrastructure that runs Google Cloud, like YouTube, Search, Maps, Docs, etc. Those run on hardware and software systems that we produce. Being at Google gives you an opportunity to see, use, and influence the future of technology.

An amazing part of the journey is the people you meet. So many of the people who were leading thinkers in important developments over the last 40 years are here. The brain trust is just amazing.

The challenge. Users upload hundreds of hours of video per minute to YouTube. That’s a huge number of bits that need to be processed in different ways, stored in different resolutions, and prepared for simultaneous viewing by millions of users, on hundreds of types of devices. Similarly, if we look at the number of search queries, it is astronomical. How do we do that? Think about the enormous computing facility we have to build to support that. It’s exciting to see these systems, but the future of global-scale applications and Google Cloud will be even more exciting and challenging.

In the hardware tiers, challenges play out in concrete ways. But in all the system software layers, it plays out in similar but very complicated ways. The world has an axiomatic system and we construct larger and larger engineering apparatuses on top of the building blocks. In a biological system, we are always evolving. Google is like the latter; it’s an ecosystem. So many of the challenges and design solutions are interacting with each other, over all of these different time scales.