Meet the woman leading Google’s efforts to build a business and a legacy in Durham
.jpg "Kamala Subramaniam, site lead of Google’s Durham office.")
Kamala Subramaniam said it was a “no brainer” to relocate from the Bay Area to the Triangle to become the new site lead for Google’s expanding hub in Durham.
In some ways, the decision is the culmination of a two-decade journey across the U.S. — as Raleigh was the first city she called home after emigrating from India in 1999.
She came here after landing a scholarship from N.C. State University to get a master’s degree and doctorate in computer science.
“As an immigrant student from India, I was pretty clueless as to what to expect here,” Subramaniam, 44, said of the Triangle. “My years here taught me that this place has people who are kind, patient and full of heart. It taught me to appreciate the four seasons.”
After graduating from N.C. State in 2006, Subramaniam went on to make a name for herself in the burgeoning field of cloud computing, first at Microsoft and then at Google. At Google, she has been an engineering lead for Google’s cloud and data centers networks. She is also the diversity and inclusion leader for Google Networking.
Her task now will be to successfully launch a cloud computing hub in downtown Durham that could be home to 1,000 employees in the next several years.
Subramaniam was not available for an in-person interview, but The News & Observer was able to conduct one via email about her decision to lead the Durham office and what we can expect. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Q. Why did you want to lead the Durham office?
Subramaniam: A trifecta led to the decision to choose this position:
Durham provided the opportunity to leave a legacy behind — both at Google and in North Carolina. Durham gives an opportunity to extend my passion for diversity and inclusion to many more underrepresented groups. Creating an ecosystem with academia, industry, and the local communities really involves a ground-up mission. We can influence the curriculum of schools and universities to help further the hiring needs of the industry. We can help increase representation of historically underrepresented groups from universities — both among the student bodies and faculty, to the industry.
Hiring 1,000 positions (and) building engineering excellence ... can be chaotic. There is charm in bringing order to the chaos, to create something tangible by navigating ambiguity, and providing it structure. This always has had my adrenaline pumping, and I am excited to be doing this in Durham.
After having lived in the Bay Area primarily for work, and as our kids were growing older, we were looking for a place where resources are plenty for our kids, and a place where our careers could also grow. Having spent seven years in North Carolina for graduate school, it was clearly our top choice and with Google opening up here, it was a no brainer.
Q. You have deep ties to N.C. State. What did your time in school teach you about the area?
Subramaniam: I came to the United States, fresh off the boat to this area in ’99. NCSU is the foundation of who I am professionally today. My undergraduate degree taught me engineering and how to ace the grades that helped me get scholarships here, without which I couldn’t have afforded to get to the United States.
NCSU not only gave me a scholarship with a full tuition waiver and a TA/RA, they taught me how to practically apply and use engineering concepts. As an immigrant student from India, I was pretty clueless as to what to expect here. My years here taught me that this place has people who are kind, patient, and full of heart. It taught me to appreciate the four seasons. While I am vegetarian, my kids are not, and they tell me this place also has the greatest BBQ.
Q. How do you plan on partnering with the local universities?
Subramaniam: In many ways.
A: The plethora of fresh talent from the universities in this region is enviable. These candidates need jobs. We need to hire. We started off by creating a process for hiring interns and fresh graduates. We piloted with NCSU because they made it so easy to have access to their graduating class, and we recreated the same for many more universities, including HBCUs. Now this process is scalable across several different universities for the coming years.
B: Creating a research pipeline with professors and their students. Innovation is the fundamental DNA of Google Cloud, and strong alliances with the university professors in the areas of cloud computing and infrastructure enables this ecosystem.
C: We hope to influence curriculum development in these universities to rethink the new wave of the cloud computing era.
D: We hope to help bring more historically underrepresented groups to both the students and the faculties in the universities.
Q. How has the hiring process been in Durham so far? Has talent been accessible — or is recruiting difficult at the moment?
Subramaniam: We’ve enjoyed great success in recruiting fresh graduates given the immense pool of universities in the area. We are hoping to apply the same success to our senior positions.
The Triangle has one of the highest concentrations of tech talent in the nation — spanning analytics, mobile applications, IoT, open source, healthcare, cloud computing, cyber security and fintech. The Triangle’s world-class talent has attracted companies from around the world. Thanks to the prevalence of technology across industry categories, there’s software and systems engineers, data scientists and other tech workers at nearly every major company in the area. We just need to find them. And we hope your audience reading this, reaches out to us.
Q. What do you think Google’s impact on the Triangle will be?
Subramaniam: If we do this right, with the help of the universities and the communities in the area, we are in position to create something special and leave a legacy behind.
A: Walking into the Google Durham site should be a statement in itself: it should be diverse with the historically underrepresented groups across all levels, it should be inclusive and collaborative in thought and innovation with a free flow of ideas amongst the best from the academia and the industry, and it should uphold the Google culture of any other office with strong focus on engineering and customer excellence.
B: Google would have forged strong partnerships via research grants and created pathways for the Historically Black Colleges and Universities to participate center stage.
C: We would have created a stable and scalable ecosystem of research, scientific discovery, and technological advancement that would be helpful not just to Google but many more companies thus enabling mobility and options for our talented engineers in the area.
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate.
This story was originally published July 15, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
