Google engineer Samriddhi Sharma joined the company full-time in July 2026 after completing internships at Google and Intuit. The IIITDM Jabalpur graduate said, "I wished she had spent less time trying to plan her entire career in advance." She encourages young graduates to focus on learning and grab available opportunities.
From college hackathons to two Google internships and a full-time engineering role, Samriddhi Sharma’s journey highlights how practical experience can shape a career. An Electronics and Communication Engineering graduate from IIITDM Jabalpur, Sharma gained industry experience at Google and Intuit before joining Google as a full-time software engineer in July 2026.
Her journey was recently featured on Google’s Life at Google account on X. Reflecting on her experience, Sharma said she wished she had spent less time trying to plan her entire career in advance.
Her advice to young professionals is to focus on the opportunities available, keep learning and remain open to where each experience might lead.
FROM COLLEGE TO GOOGLE: A JOURNEY BUILT ONE-STEP AT A TIME
At IIITDM Jabalpur, Sharma developed her programming and problem-solving skills through technical projects, coding competitions and hackathons. Her journey at Google began in 2024, when she joined the company’s Student Training in Engineering Program (STEP) as an intern.
She returned to Google in 2025 for a software engineering internship, gaining experience in data pipelines, system monitoring and performance optimisation.
Between her two Google internships, Sharma explored another opportunity in the technology sector. In January 2026, she joined Intuit as a co-op software engineering intern, working on backend infrastructure and distributed systems.
She returned to Google as a full-time software engineer in July 2026, building on the technical experience she had gained across these roles.
WHAT SHE WORKED ON AT GOOGLE AND INTUIT
During her 2024 Google STEP internship, Sharma worked with the Google Workspace team on a project involving an existing publish-subscribe model. Her responsibilities included creating a new subscriber and implementing design patterns to help protect high-value customers from sensitive actions.
In 2025, she developed automated data pipelines and a real-time dashboard to extract actionable insights from structured system logs. These tools helped teams identify performance issues, improve system efficiency and reduce debugging time.
She also identified problems associated with slow data reads that contributed to tensor processing units (TPUs) remaining idle, highlighting opportunities to improve resource utilisation. Beyond development, she delivered technical talks across teams to share best practices and encourage the adoption of engineering solutions.
At Intuit, Sharma worked on backend infrastructure for a distributed cache platform. Her responsibilities included predictive autoscaling, configuration management to minimise downtime, GitOps-based configuration delivery and AI-powered developer automation.
These experiences exposed her to the challenges of maintaining reliable systems, improving infrastructure efficiency and supporting software development at scale.
HACKATHONS, LEADERSHIP AND ACHIEVEMENTS
Sharma’s college experience extended beyond academic coursework. As a core member of BitByte, IIITDM Jabalpur’s programming club, she helped organise coding contests, conduct beginner workshops and encourage students to explore programming.
She won HackCBS 7.0, organised by Major League Hacking, where she worked on a scalable peer-to-peer resource-sharing platform. She was also a finalist in the Google Girl Hackathon and received the Google Women Techmakers Engineering Fellowship.
Her technical skills include Python, C, Java, JavaScript, React and the MERN stack. Her areas of interest include system design, distributed computing and resource optimisation.
‘YOU DON’T NEED TO HAVE YOUR ENTIRE CAREER MAPPED OUT’
Reflecting on her journey, Sharma offered advice to young professionals who feel pressured to decide their career paths early.
“You don’t need to have your entire career mapped out. Take one step at a time, make the most of where you are, and trust that your experiences will help shape where you go next,” she said.
Her advice challenges the idea that career success requires a perfect plan from the outset. Instead, she encourages young graduates to focus on what they can learn and achieve in their current circumstances.
WHAT YOUNG GRADUATES CAN LEARN
Sharma’s journey highlights the value of combining academic learning with practical experience. Coding competitions, hackathons, internships and technical projects can help students strengthen their skills, understand industry expectations and explore different areas of technology.
Her experience also underscores the importance of treating each opportunity as a chance to learn, whether it involves solving a technical problem, collaborating with a team or understanding how large-scale systems operate.
For young graduates navigating an uncertain job market, her message is simple: build your skills, make the most of the opportunities available and allow your experiences to inform your next career move.