There are very few people who actually work under Google Research, everyone else is a software engineer (including everyone who worked on my research paper with

There are very few people who actually work under Google Research, everyone else is a software engineer (including everyone who worked on my research paper with me [1]). The trick is to realize that there are many product teams for which what you'll be doing are researchy style jobs. These are usually things where you're working on the backend (Compute Platform, Search, Google X) rather than the frontend (Javascript UI stuff). While the job description is software engineer, for those reasearchy jobs, you're doing work that's very similar to what you might be trying at the university lab. Except with a lot more data, and a lot more computing power behind you. Matt Welsh has written a number of times about his job change from Harvard Prof to Google, and he's a software engineer by title AFAIK, but he's clearly doing research work. [1] http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41145.html http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41145.html