We make sure that Google is running for you
‘LET me Google that’. It’s not often that a company is so much a part of everyday life that its name becomes a verb, but Google is one of the most successful companies in the digital world.
And when it comes to data analytics, Google is one of the biggest names in the business. But for data analytics to work, the company’s services such as Gmail, YouTube, ads and the plain old search engine need to work reliably.
That’s where ‘site reliability engineering’ or SRE comes in. This is the wizardry and hard work that ensures web users have a seamless experience when they use Google products and services.
“We want to make sure that when you go on to YouTube it is running,” explains Eimear Crotty, a software engineer with the SRE team at Google’s European headquarters in Dublin.
“Whether you are in Australia or New York, we make sure Google is running for you, and we want to enable teams in Google to build features in, be innovative and to ensure that people can use these features, that the systems are scalable and reliable.”
When Crotty was in school, medicine was on her radar because there are many medical professionals in her family. But at the last minute, she decided on computer science and soon found she enjoyed computer programming. “I haven’t looked back,” she says.
She finished her final exams in University College Cork last May and by September she was starting in Google as one of about 450 engineers working in SRE in Dublin. Google employs around 7,000 people in Ireland with jobs across a range of areas, including engineering, sales and marketing and operations.
Crotty is now on a team that includes people who have been with Google for more than a decade and who have worked across several groups within the organisation. “They bring expertise from other teams, and from that you get a better view of the bigger picture,” she says.
While her work enables data analytics, she also sees how artificial intelligence and machine learning will become more and more important in her line of work.
“The great thing about having a degree in computer science is that you can continue to learn yourself about the emerging skills,” says Crotty. “I did modules on artificial intelligence when I was in college and I can see how it can be applied to so many areas. It is a very useful thing to know about if you work in the digital sector.”