It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood: growing in Pittsburgh

Nearly five years ago, we announced that we would begin building an engineering presence in Pittsburgh, a city with a strong technology ecosystem as well as an entrepreneurial spirit and great quality of life. Since then, we’ve grown from two engineers to more than 150, and we’re continuing our commitment to growth in the region as we've officially opened a new Google Pittsburgh office in an old Nabisco factory in Bakery Square.

The Collaborative Innovation Center at Carnegie Mellon University had been our home since 2006, and our relationship with CMU remains invaluable to us. On top of the strong pipeline of brilliant engineers emerging from local universities, we’re seeing a “boomerang effect” of Pittsburghers who previously believed they had to go elsewhere to succeed with careers in computer science and engineering. We hope that the scrappy start-up culture we’ve maintained from the beginning at Google Pittsburgh as well as the burgeoning tech community throughout the city continues to encourage them to consider coming home.

In addition to teams focused on core initiatives related to Product Search and Ads Quality, we’re proud to be home to 20% time projects including the Sky Map planetarium app for Android phones, which combines astronomy, physics and computer science to put the galaxies in your pocket (and now includes the ability to time travel!) and Sky in Google Earth, which enables you to look upward from your position in Google Earth to view the heavenly objects above. Luis von Ahn and his reCAPTCHA team lead development of a technology that improves the process of converting scanned images into plain text, which powers initiatives like Google Books, and we welcome our first Enterprise sales leads who are working to help businesses and organizations in the region consider the benefits of cloud computing with Google Apps.



Our almost-40,000 square-foot space is Googley in many ways, but my favorite characteristics include a climbable trapeze net that extends from our second floor into thin air and a massive cookie-dough mixer preserved from the former Nabisco factory, which pays homage to Bakery Square’s manufacturing heritage.

If this sounds like the place for you, take a look at our open jobs and apply. We’re growing in Pittsburgh.

Posted by Andrew Moore, Engineering Director, Google Pittsburgh