Google announces its biggest expansion in the Brazilian engineering sector

In the wake of the earthquake that the pandemic caused in work routines around the world, Google will double its workforce in the Brazilian engineering sector – the intention is to go from the current 200 employees in the area to 400 by the end of 2023.

The expansion is only comparable to that of 2015, when the company announced that the number of employees would also double, from 100 to 200.

Although growth plans for the region were already on the tech giant’s radar before the coronavirus, the announcement comes after a year of unprecedented investment in innovation in the country.

In 2021, more than US$ 9.4 billion were injected into startups, more than double that of 2021, a year that had already beaten any previous value. The rain of liquidity reverberated in the number of new unicorns, another record: Brazil gained 10 technology companies with a market value of over US$ 1 billion.

In the middle of last year, the chief executive of Alphabet, which owns Google, said that the company would have a hybrid model of work. Employees would work from the office, but not as often.

With the decision came the question: “Do we need to concentrate our engineering force in California or can we expand it to other places?”, recalls Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, Google’s director of engineering for Latin America.

Apparently, the answer is expansion. In addition to the growth in Brazil, most of the positions offered will be in a hybrid regime – on average, three days working at the office and two working days from home. In some cases, the vacancy will be completely remote.

The pandemic, however, does not explain everything, according to Ribeiro-Neto.

“Whenever you think about internationalization, particularly in the world of the web, Brazil is a star of the first magnitude”, he says. “It is natural that it is expanding in Brazil.”

The engineer refers to the time Brazilians spend online, always at the top of the world rankings, but also to professionals in the country. “We have a talent bank here,” he says.

Ribeiro-Neto is known as Google’s number one employee in Brazil. After creating the search tool Akwan —lightly, in Guarani— in the late 1990s at UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais), he was noticed by the company.

“Traffic exploded,” he recalls. The tool was purchased by the search giant in 2005, when it had already left the educational institution and was a startup.

The hands of Google’s Brazilian employees are in many of the programs known to users around the world. The feature to track soccer match results, for example, has a significant contribution from engineers in Brazil, as does Family Link, which allows parents to monitor their children’s cell phone use from a distance.

The latter is one of the sectors that will be strengthened with the arrival of the new workforce. Also on the list are traditional areas, such as search, and those that are at the center of the internet debate today: user privacy and security.

Big tech companies are facing some battles in recent years. US President Joe Biden has pursued a more aggressive regulatory agenda towards these companies since he stepped into the White House in early 2021. last year.

In the Brazilian expansion, most of the employees will be allocated in Belo Horizonte, the birthplace of Google in the country: the office has already been expanded due to the expectation of the increase. There are also vacancies in São Paulo, in addition to the possibility of working from any location in remote vacancies.

“Brazil is a market and a powerhouse in terms of talent,” says Daniel Borges, Google’s recruitment leader for Latin America. It outlines some of the characteristics the company looks for in its employees: problem-solving skills, leadership and initiative, transparency and role-related experience.

On the part of Google, there is an attempt, according to Borges, not to search for very specific profiles – which, according to him, limits the company’s ability to diversify its workforce.

“We position ourselves as an affirmative action company”, he says. There are no vacancies for black people, who enter the general selection, but there are channels dedicated to the group, where the person can apply.

“Our business is multiple, for billions of users. If we follow a path of homogeneity, our results will certainly deteriorate in the long term”, says Borges. “It’s a competitive and strategic advantage.”

For engineer Ribeiro-Neto, the expansion is “a recognition by Google of Brazil’s relevance to the company”. And he goes further: “at some point — not in the next two years — I have an engineering center with 500 engineers in mind.”