google phd jobs

Help advance the future of computer science

Our teams are innovating at the cutting edge of their fields in order to tackle challenges and build products that impact billions of people every day.

Our mission and philosophy

The research conducted at google has broadened dramatically, becoming more important to our mission than ever before..

We aim to create a research environment rich in opportunities for product impact, to build a product environment that actively benefits from research, and to provide our staff the freedom to work on important research problems that go beyond immediate product needs.

Explore our locations

Offices around the world.

From Accra to Zürich, to our home base in Mountain View and beyond, we’re looking for talented, creative computer scientists to drive our work forward.

North America

Our teams in Atlanta focus on theoretical and application aspects of computer science with a strong focus on machine learning and the algorithmic foundations and theoretical underpinnings of deep learning, with applications to natural language understanding, machine perception, robotics, and ubiquitous computing and sensing.

Our teams in Cambridge work closely with academics at local universities as well as collaborators at local institutes with a goal to impact both Google’s products and general scientific progress. We accomplish this by releasing open source tools, publishing our work and sharing our findings with the academic community.

More boardshorts than boardroom, high tech meets high tide at Google L.A. Our engineers work on such high-impact products as Ads, Chrome, and YouTube, while our sales teams push the limits of digital advertising for top-tier clients. Take advantage of our picture-perfect SoCal weather by hitting the rock wall and elevate team strategy sessions with a game of oversized chess on the roof deck. In-house coffee and juice bars provide pick-me-ups, and beach breaks double as brainstorm sessions when you borrow one of our 4-seat surrey bikes, beach cruisers, or surfboards and head to the boardwalk.

Google Research in Montreal performs both open-ended and applied research, in numerous areas including reinforcement learning, meta-learning, optimization, program synthesis, generative modeling, machine translation, and more. We also support the local academic community and have several academic collaborations, including with Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute.

Our headquarters has come a long way from its humble roots in a Menlo Park garage, but our innovative Silicon Valley spirit is stronger than ever. On our largest campus, we work on cutting-edge products that are changing the way billions of people use technology. Onsite benefits like fitness and wellness centers embody our philosophy that taking care of Googlers is good for all of us. Build team skills with a group cooking class or coffee tasting, ride a gBike to one of our cafés, or work up a sweat in a group class. Here at the Googleplex, we’re looking for innovators, collaborators, and blue-sky thinkers. We’re looking for you.

We work in close collaboration with academia, with a goal to impact both Google’s products and general scientific progress. We accomplish this in two ways: by releasing software libraries, a way to build research findings into products and services, and through publishing our work and sharing our findings with the academic community.

Our team in Pittsburgh conducts research in natural language processing, machine learning, image and video understanding, and optimization, and our impacts range from academic paper publications to software systems used throughout Google. We collaborate closely with research and applied groups in many areas, and also work closely with Carnegie Mellon University and other organizations in the extremely strong computer science community in Pittsburgh.

As our company headquarters, Mountain View and the surrounding offices in Sunnyvale, San Francisco, and San Bruno are home to many of our world-class research teams and the innovative projects they work on.

Our research teams in Seattle and Kirkland work on a wide range of disciplines — from quantum computing to applied science to federated learning and health. In doing the above, and more, a large focus of our work also focuses on advancing the state of the art in machine learning.

Nestled between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the San Francisco Bay, with San Jose to the south, San Francisco to the north, and NASA right next door, you’ll find one of Google’s largest and newest global campuses in Sunnyvale. Here in the heart of the original Silicon Valley innovation is happening everywhere—from our Cloud team developing exciting new products and services, to moving into our latest office spaces which include interconnected building projects, the creation of green spaces connecting campuses with the community, and the creative restoration of local habitats. We love growing in Sunnyvale—and you will too.

We develop novel neural network architectures and learning algorithms, with applications to computer vision, natural language and speech processing, medical image analysis, and computer architecture and software.

Europe, Middle East, and Africa

Google Research teams in Accra collaborate with global research teams to lead many sustainability initiatives of particular interest to Africa. We implement theoretical and applied artificial intelligence with a strong focus on machine learning and algorithmic foundations to tackle some global challenges, such as food security, disaster management, remote sensing, among others.

Researchers in our Amsterdam office push the boundaries of what is possible in many domains, including natural language understanding, computer vision and audio, reinforcement learning and machine learning for the natural sciences.

In Berlin, our teams work on a range of topics from foundational to more applied and involve data comprised of text, images, video, audio and more. We are engaging and collaborating closely with Berlin’s vibrant academic and startup communities.

We work on machine learning, natural language understanding and machine perception, from foundational research to AI innovations, in search, healthcare, and crisis response.

We work on natural language understanding and conversational dialog, text-to-speech, (on-device) machine learning, human-centered AI research and user research as well as healthcare.

We work on problems in quantum computing as well as speech and language processing, and collaborate closely with Google’s product teams across the world.

We tackle big challenges across several fields at the intersection of computer science, statistics and applied mathematics while collaborating closely with a strong academic community.

We solve big challenges in computer science, with a focus on machine learning, natural language understanding, machine perception, algorithms and data compression.

Asia-Pacific

Google Research Australia aims to advance the state-of-the-art in machine learning, in areas such as Fundamental Machine Learning, Natural Language Understanding, and Systems Programming. We aim to apply our research in ways that benefit Australia, Google and global society.

We are interested in advancing the state of the art and applications in areas like Machine Learning, Natural Language Understanding, Computer Vision, Software Engineering and Multi-agent Systems.

We are interested in advancing the state of the art and applications in areas like machine learning, speech, and natural language processing.

Meet the teams driving innovation

Our teams advance the state of the art through research, systems engineering, and collaboration across Google.

Our impact reaches billions

Google Research tackles challenges that define the technology of today and tomorrow.

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Find your research career at Google

Our researchers are embedded in teams across computer science, to discover, invent, and build at the largest scale.

Our research-focused software engineers are embedded throughout the company, allowing them to setup large-scale tests and deploy promising ideas quickly and broadly.

Work across data mining, natural language processing, hardware and software performance analysis, improving compilation techniques for mobile platforms, core search, and much more.

Internships take place throughout the year, and we encourage students from a range of disciplines, including CS, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Physics to apply to work with us.

Collaboration is essential for progress

We’re proud to work with academic and research institutions that push the boundaries of AI and computer science.

Measuring and improving the accuracy, safety, speed, and efficiency of AI technologies.

Working to advance fire modeling tools and fire spread prediction algorithms.

Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI are launching the Frontier Model Forum, an industry body focused on ensuring safe and responsible development of frontier AI models.

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Internships

Internships in business, engineering and technology, and more

You can explore all open internships on the Google Careers site.

Our interns

#GoogleInterns work across Google, including being part of various teams like software engineering, business, user experience, and more. With internships across the globe, we offer many opportunities to grow with us and help create products and services used by billions. Come help us build for everyone.

Browse our internships

The internships below are not exhaustive, and may or may not be currently available, but provide a taste of the various internships Google offers.

Showing 9 results

Business Internships

Business internships include multiple teams and roles within the business world at Google. Available outside of the united States, the internship is for undergraduate and graduate students with qualifications and application dates varying by location.

STEP Internship

STEP (Student Training in Engineering Program) is a development project that is focused on students that have a passion for technology. Requirements and application dates vary location.

Software Engineering Internship

Software engineering internships are available throughout the globe to undergraduate and graduate/PhD students, with rolling application dates (depending on location). Our interns have a broad set of technical skills, enable them to tackle some of technology's greatest challenges.

Associate Product Manager Internship

Our interns bridge technical and business worlds, designing technology with engineers and then zooming out of lead matrix teams such as Sales, Marketing, and Finance, to name a few. The internship is available globally, with varying requirements and application dates.

Legal Internship

Offered in certain countries outside of North America, the Legal internship is open to students majoring or specializing in legal studies. Applications generally open in October.

BOLD Internship

BOLD interns join teams across Sales, Marketing, and People Operations to identify challenges, collaborate on building solutions, and drive meaningful change for clients and users - all while developing skills and building careers. Applications open in October for rising undergraduate seniors.

MBA Internship

Our MBA internships are offered throughout the globe, and interns are able to put their education to use on day one. Available to students currently enrolled in a MBA program (with specific rquirements tied to the internship location, and applications open in September and October).

Korean Veteran Business Internship

Veteran Business Internship is designed for students who are direct descendants of Korean veterans. It is a 6-month upskilling program and includes multiple teams and roles in the business world at Google.

Hardware Engineering Internship

As a Hardware Engineering Intern, you will work on our core Consumer Hardware products. The teams you work with design, develop, and deploy next generation consumer hardware while ensuring that this equipment is reliable.

Google Internship FAQs

Want to learn more about internships at Google? This collection shares some of the most common questions we get from across the globe (for the best info on particular roles, search our jobs page and check each role’s job description). Want more help to prepare? Head to our Google Students YouTube page and find our Virtual Career Fair, tips, info, and more.

You might also like

SCHOLARSHIP

Generation Google Scholarship (APAC)

Designed to help students pursuing computer science degrees excel in technology and become leaders in the field. We strongly encourage women to apply.

APPRENTICESHIP

Apprenticeships

Apprenticeships join different teams to gain practical skills while at Google, and student towards an externally-recognized qualification.

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Google jobs are coveted but competitive. Here's how to get hired and what skills make you fit for a Google career.

• Google is one of America's most highly sought after companies to work for.
• But Google is also notoriously competitive and selective about employees.
• Google hires people with relevant job skills, intelligence, leadership abilities, and "Googleyness."

For years, Google has cultivated a reputation for being one of the best US companies to work for . 

With consistently high rankings in areas like compensation, office perks (the Googleplex famously boasts amenities like swimming pools, gardens, massage rooms, and more), innovative and meaningful work, and low stress, it's no wonder tech industry workers have clamored for roles at Google.

Google's parent company, Alphabet , had more than 182,500 employees as of 2023, and not all of them were tech jobs. Google also offers roles in sales, marketing, business strategy, finance, maintenance, legal, and more.

It's not all roses, though. Like much of the tech industry, layoffs at Google have become more commonplace in recent years. Alphabet laid off 12,000 employees in 2023, and CEO Sundar Pichai warned of more layoffs in 2024.

Still, the Google Careers website lists hundreds of job openings worldwide, across all sorts of divisions — some roles are specific to Google's search engine, others are for YouTube , and others are for projects within Google's suite of productivity apps, like Google Classroom .

Here's what you need to know to land one of Google's open jobs.

How to get a job at Google

Getting hired at Google is notoriously competitive.

One former Google recruiter said the company primarily uses an internal database to find candidates, but the second-most popular way to scout potential employees is LinkedIn — build out your profile and use it to connect with people who already work there and can give you a referral.

The recruiter said one of the best ways to stand out among Google's candidate pool is to network with a "giving approach." For example, job candidates should email hiring managers directly to make a connection and then steer the conversation to express interest in a specific role.

The recruiter also encouraged job applicants to tailor their resumes to individual job descriptions and, during the interview process, describe details of how they solved a problem in a past role.

Is it difficult to get hired at Google?

Google is known throughout the tech industry for having a lengthy, difficult hiring process, and for being ultra-selective about its candidates. Of the 2 million job applications Google receives each year, it hires roughly 4,000.

Related stories

Google bases its hiring decisions on four key metrics: job-related skills, general cognitive ability, leadership abilities (even for non-managerial roles!), and what the company calls "Googleyness" — meaning how well your personality will fit in at Google.

Former Google executives and recruiters have defined "Googleyness" as a mixture of proactiveness, positivity, humility, playfulness, conscientiousness, and openness to learning.

Google also has a multi-step hiring process. It encourages people to start by self-reflecting on what they truly want out of a career. Then, search and apply for a job on the company's website.

Google suggests applicants build a job-specific resume that ties their skills and experience to the job requirements. Including data to illustrate your successes in managing projects will help your resume stand out. 

One Google engineer who shared the resume that helped him land a $300,000 job at the company recommended de-emphasizing educational credentials, emphasizing items that are more relevant, and adding a section for interests or hobbies — you never know if it could spark conversation and help break the ice.

Google's hiring process has been revamped in recent years to reduce delays, particularly for tech roles like software engineers and UX designers. Candidates used to labor through months of interviews, then fail at the stage where Google matches the candidate with a team.

Now, candidates are assigned teams much earlier, and some can skip over certain stages. It's common for applicants to undergo at least three or four interview rounds before receiving an offer, however.

Can I work at Google from home?

Like most companies, Google allowed employees to work remotely throughout the pandemic. But Google cracked down on remote work in 2023, and implemented a new policy requiring workers to return to the office at least three days a week on a hybrid schedule.

Google now offers remote opportunities by exception only. The company has even said it would tie in-office attendance to an employee's performance review. 

Do you need experience to work at Google?

The experience Google requires for job candidates varies by role, as does education. 

There's no one particular college degree that will get you in the door at Google — and, in fact, company executives have said they'll hire "exceptional" candidates who have no college degree at all. But don't get too excited; experts say college degrees are still the most reliable pathways to high-paying tech jobs.

If your goal is to become a software engineer at Google, it makes sense that a computer science degree might be beneficial. But Google does not explicitly require one for most software engineering roles.

Google offers jobs with a range of experience requirements, from interns, to mid-career, to executive level. Here are some examples:

• A data center technician role requires two years of experience in "operating systems and networking protocols," with maintenance and monitoring of server systems and troubleshooting servers and network hardware.
• A supply chain program manager requires five years of experience in program or project management and systems and hardware product design or manufacturing. A supply chain, manufacturing, or similar degree is also required.
• A staff software engineer requires a bachelor's degree, eight years of software development experience, five years of testing and launching software products and machine learning algorithms and tools, and three years of software design.

On February 28, Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, joined 31 other media groups and filed a $2.3 billion suit against Google in Dutch court, alleging losses suffered due to the company's advertising practices.

Watch: Marketing leaders from Amazon, LinkedIn, Lego Group and more tell Insider what pandemic-fueled business changes are likely to stick around

• Main content

‘There are no jobs’: PhD graduates struggle to build careers in academia

For the first time in decades, Ian Corbin has dental insurance.

Over the past 15 years, Corbin has been a doctoral student, an adjunct professor, and a postdoctoral fellow. And trying to scrape together a living has been tough. “I was always hustling,” he says.

When Corbin — who holds a PhD in philosophy from Boston College and works at the intersection of ethics and medicine — was a postdoc at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2019, he earned about $50,000 a year and had kids to support. “So I was always teaching classes in the evening and publishing articles as fast as I could. Just taking on really anything that anyone would give me,” he says.

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Corbin’s story isn’t unusual. For many of those with doctorates, who typically spend between four and seven years in graduate school, the employment picture is increasingly bleak, especially for jobs in academia.

Maren Wood, who founded a firm that helps those with doctorates find jobs, says that the market for full-time professors has collapsed. Between 2007 and 2020, the number of openings in philosophy dropped by roughly half. The number of openings in English fell by about 60 percent .

Universities staffed up to accommodate millennials, she says, and now they’re trying to cope with declining enrollments, which are predicted to continue indefinitely . “There’s nothing wrong with a PhD,” says Wood, chief executive of Beyond the Professoriate, whose platform is currently used by Harvard and BC . “The problem is there are no jobs.”

Wood holds a PhD in history, and her breaking point was in 2011 when she came in second place for a job thousands of miles away. The gig was a one-year position. In Reno. And she was told the pay wouldn’t even be enough to live on.

The woman doing the hiring encouraged Wood. “You came in second place!” she exclaimed.

“For what?” Wood asked.

Wood had hoped to be a professor. She had been a top student and earned her PhD from the University of North Carolina. But it didn’t take long to realize: Despite the fact that she had a prestigious degree, there were virtually no decent jobs in universities.

Often, those with doctorates serve as adjunct professors — sometimes while they look for a more permanent gig. To students, adjuncts and tenure-track faculty may appear to be the same. They have PhDs. Students call them “professor.”

But when it comes to stability, they’re worlds apart. Adjuncts rarely get health care. They’re generally paid between $3,000 and $7,000 per class, and you might have to drive considerable distances to get from one job to another.

Over 30 percent of nontenure-track educators in higher education make under $25,000 a year, according to a 2019 survey by the American Federation of Teachers . Another 30 percent make between $25,000 and $50,000 a year. But over the past few decades, the number of adjuncts has grown much faster than the ranks of full-time faculty.

The dearth of jobs has been particularly tough on those in the social sciences, humanities, and some sciences, including biology. Richard Larson, a professor of data, systems, and society at MIT, has noted that many professors churn out lots of doctoral students over the course of their careers — and a good chunk of those students would like to be professors themselves.

But the math simply doesn’t work. Only a few of those grad students — fewer than 20 percent — can get the sort of job that their advisers have. (Though there are certainly disciplines — including chemical engineering and computer science — in which graduates can find jobs fairly easily, often in industry.)

Kristina Aikens, who earned her PhD in English from Tufts University, initially tried to piece together a living as an adjunct. For a year and a half, she says, she was teaching four or five classes in two or three locations, which is a common — though brutal — workload.

Aikens doesn’t believe that doctoral students — particularly in humanities — understand the real threat of finding themselves in an unstable position. “I think people think it won’t happen to them,” she says. “It’s not because they think that they’re better than anyone else. It’s just a denial that they’re in.”

But the threat of job instability is considerable. Massachusetts is not only the state with the highest percentage of people with undergraduate degrees; it also has the highest percentage of those with graduate degrees . And while many of those degree holders are thriving, too many live in precarious situations — situations made all the more precarious by the extraordinarily high cost of housing in the Boston area.

So if the supply of academic jobs has waned, why don’t doctoral programs simply slim down and admit fewer students?

Most of the people I spoke with noted that professors may be loath to give up their graduate students because they genuinely enjoy working with them. Grad students can talk about esoteric areas of scholarship, built on years of deep study.

“I think that faculty want to believe that they’re doing good,” says Wood. “I think that graduate deans generally believe that graduate education does good. And the fact that universities have paid so little attention to career outcomes means that they don’t actually have good data to work with.”

It’s also possible that schools’ reluctance to admit fewer graduate students is financially motivated. Universities often run on the work of grad students, as the Boston University strike has demonstrated . Grad students teach sections of large classes. They work in labs. They perform in-the-field research.

“The business model only works with a lot of cheap labor,” Corbin says. “I think it’s bad. I think it’s bad for students. I think it’s bad for the classroom. I think it’s bad for the grad students and the perennial adjuncts.” But, he believes, doctoral students represent an enormous pool of untapped talent.

Corbin is now a tenure-track researcher in neurology at Harvard Medical School, with a secondary appointment in bioethics. It’s a job he likes, and life feels much more stable. “It’s becoming less desperate,” he says.

Aikens — who now serves as the program director of writing support at Tufts — says she doesn’t regret getting a doctorate, and she doesn’t think we should preclude people from pursuing that sort of intense study.

Coming from a working-class background in West Virginia, she had wanted to see if she could do it. And the six years she spent getting a PhD were hard. But she knew that success wouldn’t necessarily lead to employment:

“At my graduation, literally at the ceremony, I turned to my friend and said: ‘Should I apply to law school? Because I don’t think this is going to work out.’”

Follow Kara Miller @karaemiller .

• Applications

PhD grant (3 years)

Job Information

Offer description.

Applications are welcome for two positions (post-doc and PhD) funded by an ERC Starting Grant (European Research Council; PI: Mathieu Servant; https://sites.google.com/view/mathieu-servant/accueil ). The 5-year project ITDA aims at elaborating an integrated theory of decision and motor processes in humans, and using the theory to provide new mechanistic explanations of impulsive behavior in a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders. The ideal candidates are highly motivated and creative individuals, capable of working independently and in groups.

The research will take place at the Laboratory for Integrative Research in Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology (INSERM, UMR 1322) and the MSHE Ledoux (CNRS, USR 3124), embedded in a rich scientific environment with active national and international collaborations. Both laboratories are located in Besançon (France), a beautiful city on the border of Switzerland surrounded by remarkable, nature-filled outdoors.

ERC Starting Grants are designed to support outstanding researchers of any nationality who are starting to develop an independent career and intend to establish their own research team or program in the EU or an Associated Country ( https://erc.europa.eu/funding/starting-grants ).

PhD grant (3 years ). The successful applicant will be responsible for developing theoretical hypotheses pertaining to decision-making and motor control, and then conducting experimental tests, ultimately leading to the write-up of scientific work. Part of the research project will consist in evaluating the effect of Parkinson's disease on decision-making and motor control, and will be conducted in tandem with Matthieu Béreau (Professor of neurology, University Hospital of Besançon). 

Requirements

Master 2 or equivalent degree in cognitive psychology, cognitive sciences, mathematical psychology, cognitive neuroscience; strong motivation for studying the neurocognitive bases of human decisional and motor processes. Applications from candidates with a Master 2 or equivalent degree in biomedical engineering or computer science are also accepted, as long as the candidate manifests a strong interest in cognitive sciences.

HELPFUL: Good programming skills (Python/R/Matlab), experience with electrophysiological techniques, good English level.

Additional Information

The position is expected to start on September 1 st 2024.

To apply, please send a CV and a motivation letter (in electronic format) to Mathieu Servant ( [email protected] ). 

Work Location(s)

Where to apply.