It was standing room only in one of Imperial College London's lecture theatres on Monday night, as Google came to town to give a peek at the company and its technology to would-be Googlistas.
In a one-hour talk at Imperial's South Kensington campus, Google vice-president of engineering Urs Hölzle took developers and engineers through some of the challenges facing Google as it deals with over 1,000 queries a second searching an ever-growing Web of information.
"The vast majority of our users are from outside the US and thus we're beginning to build our international team," said Hölzle, before launching into an explanation of the challenges Google faces in running its search engine 24 hours a day, 365 days a year with no downtime in four years. "The last time we had a complete system failure was in February 2000… the main switch failed," he told the audience. "That is also the last time we ran a single data centre."
Today Google runs a system with massive redundancy built in and software written to assume there will be failures -- of PCs, of hard disks and of networking infrastructure. It is to help improve these systems, that Google is looking for new people.
"We work in small teams of three to five people," said Hölzle. "We have a 20 percent time quota for engineering, so you can spend that time on something that someone else is doing, which you might find interesting or fun." Google currently employs some 200 PhDs and 600 computer scientists, he added. "That means that if you have a hard problem in some area, you can always find someone to help."
Google's Swat Team -- the site reliability team, whose job is to figure out why something doesn't work or why it works too slowly -- is based in Dublin. "This is actually a very tough job because it combines a really deep background in clusters, networking, software and hardware. You really need to understand how things work."
The company's Zurich offices is more involved in research and development, while the London office is more likely to recruit sales engineers to help customers, said Hölzle.
In a Google goody bag handed out to attendees, the company gave an idea of the skills it is seeking for the Dublin Swat Team: a Site reliability manager; people with skills in Unix systems and MySQL administration; spam detection and prevention methods; high availability systems architecture and administration; Java application troubleshooting; deeply technical project management; large-scale systems administration automation; Perl; and a Wild Linux Tamer. "Is your current employer a verb?" asked the literature. If so, potential recruits were advised to check Google's jobs page.
