The hottest jobs at Google in Hong Kong and what it takes to get one

If you’re looking for a Hong Kong-based job to cushion your career during Covid-19, working for Google Cloud may be a good option. Hong Kong isn’t a major office for Google – the company’s investment in the territory was initially stymied by its 2013 decision not to open a data centre there – but its cloud unit has a comparative abundance of local roles on offer.

Google still has 22 Hong Kong jobs on its careers site – about an average number for the tech firm, whose APAC headquarters is in Singapore. This is despite Google announcing on 15 April that it will “significantly slow” hiring globally for the remainder of the year and fill roles “in a small number of strategic areas”.

Half of Google's Hong Kong roles have a cloud focus, suggesting that you don’t have to relocate to Singapore to land a Google Cloud job. And of these, most are technology roles.

There are, for example, openings for cloud architects. One of these, an enterprise architecture job, requires you to “make recommendations on integration strategies, enterprise architectures, platforms and application infrastructure”. Meanwhile, as a Hong Kong-based ‘infrastructure modernization specialist’ at Google, you’ll be suggesting migration strategies and enterprise architectures for clients of Google Cloud. A Master's degree in Computer Science and experience in networking are preferred for this role.

But your technical skills alone are unlikely to be enough to get you into any Google Cloud job in Hong Kong. All the cloud-focused tech roles on Google’s careers site highlight the importance of interaction with clients and colleagues in other teams. If you’re a technologist at a Hong Kong bank frustrated about your support-role status and isolation from the front-office and clients, this may provide you with an extra incentive to join Google.

The ‘customer engineer, machine learning’ vacancy is essentially a sales engineer job, requiring you to “work hand-in-hand with technical sales teams as a machine learning subject matter expert to differentiate Google Cloud to our customers”. Meanwhile, Google’s ‘partner engineer’ jobs are less about sales and more about bridging the gap between a customer’s needs and the ability of a third-party vendor to deliver on them using Google Cloud as a platform. 

If you want to move from a cloud role at a bank to Google Cloud, you need to convince Google that you are adaptable enough to make what is potentially a challenging transition. “In banking, the major cloud focus is on architecture design, implementation and BAU support, while roles in cloud companies like Google, Azure, AWS and Alibaba involve pre-sales, facing clients, relationship building, and providing architecture design and solution proposals,” says Danny Kwan, a managing consultant at technology recruiters Pinpoint Asia. “You also need to be presentable on stage to do live demos and presentations,” he adds.

Bottom line: in a Google Cloud job interview in Hong Kong, you can expect to be tested not just on your technical ability, but also on your communication and collaboration skills, and your knowledge of the cloud business in Asia.

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