Building a Network

By David Menconi

Kamala Subramaniam ’01 ms, ’06 phd is the site lead for Google’s new cloud engineering hub in Durham, N.C., a job with some eye-catching duties. The highest-profile part of her job is overseeing hiring, with the goal of bringing the hub’s workforce up to 1,000 engineers within three years. There are technical responsibilities that call on her skills picked up studying computer networking engineering at NC State.

But the job also involves a lot of people skills and networking. That’s why she and her family of four relocated from northern California’s Bay Area to Durham.

“This is not a job that can be run remotely, because it’s about a lot more than just Google itself,” says Subramaniam. “It’s about creating systems between people and Google and industry and academia and local communities. Personal interactions are a big part of that.”

It’s about creating systems between people and Google and industry and academia and local communities.

Originally from Bangalore, India, Subramaniam earned her undergraduate degree from Visvesvaraya Technological University before turning to the U.S. for graduate work. She selected NC State because of the university’s personal touch. “The warmth of everyone from people in admissions to professors made the difference,” she says.

Subramaniam, 44, worked at Microsoft before coming to Google in 2016, rising through the ranks and taking the site-lead job in June 2021. Even though she’s not writing code every day, Google’s managerial positions are still highly technical. She has worked on projects including “Zero Touch Networking” (defined as “an intent-driven network to enable sublinear growth”) and “Bandwidth Enforcer,” which is basically online traffic control.

Eventually, Subramaniam hopes to return to one of her hobbies, theater. She has acted in productions including Neil Simon’s Rumors at the Naatak Theater in Santa Clara, Calif. “It’s really fun and breaks the routine, part of a work-life balance to manage stress,” she says. “For three months of rehearsals and showtime, I get to be something besides an engineer or a soccer mom.”