DURHAM – Kamala Subramaniam, a graduate of North Carolina State University, has three priorities as she leads Google’s efforts to build an engineering hub in the Bull City: Hiring, alliances and culture. Especially hiring.

“We can’t hire fast enough,” she says.

More than 25 positions are already available, according to a Googe jobs website, and over time Google has said as many as 1,000 jobs will be created in Durham.

Named as the engineering site lead last week, Subramaniam talks with WRAL TechWire about the new job, her plans, what she’s looking for in employees, and why she chose to enroll at N.C. State after emigrating from India.

Our Q&A:

  • As site lead, what are your priorities for the Durham site?

Hiring: Hiring the most talented engineers across all levels with a key focus on historically underrepresented groups.

Alliances: Create stable and scalable alliances with the universities in the area to foster innovation and build pipelines for interns and fresh graduates.

Culture: Create a culture in Durham that focuses on strong engineering and customer excellence, that is diverse, inclusive, and collaborative.

  • How rapidly do you plan to add staff?

We need to add staff yesterday! Seriously though, we have many open positions and cannot hire fast enough. Please check out this link for a list of all positions.

  • What are key strengths you want in employees?

From an engineering perspective, we are looking for skill sets that behoove all infrastructure systems – core system design knowledge to design large scale distributed systems, proficiency in core programming languages such as C++, Go, python, with domain knowledge in networking, storage, analytics, etc a bonus. F

or soft skills, we are looking for candidates that can collaborate well and work in teams, that are keen on consensus building, that understand that true success is about putting your teams and customers first.

  • What factors led you to come to the US and enroll at NCSU?

Part nurture and part nature. For generations, our family has inculcated in us a keen focus on academia, and the United States has the best education system. I took the GRE and TOEFL tests and applied to universities while I was in my final year of undergrad. Getting a paid scholarship with full tuition waiver was imperative which otherwise would have left a huge financial burden on my parents.

NCSU was one of the universities that offered me that and amongst that it was the highest ranked university. Coupled with that, it was forming a strong tech hub in the RTP area with Nortel Networks, Cisco, Ericsson, and IBM thriving then. This was the data driven decision of my choice.

When I reached out to a few professors at NCSU, they were immediately welcoming and invited me into their world of research. Everyone from the admissions committee to the admins, professors and the international students were very kind. This was when heart trumped data and I finalized NCSU.

Google names NCSU grad as cloud engineering hub site lead in Durham