What are test engineer roles like at Google? I’ve basically only spent my time in startups on critical systems (defense, finance) so have no idea what it’d be like at a larger company or team.
It's varied. Some posts below describe the standard software test engineering. Test engineers on Google Fiber would buy every microwave and 2.4GHz cordless phone and baby monitor, and see if our changes to interference mitigation algorithms improved or regressed between releases. So you're basically in a lab trying to break Wifi algorithms, probably not writing much code. (Also things like "does our change to move iPhone 6 to 5GHz when it's closer to the 5GHz access point also work with and iPhone 5?")
This was a long time ago and it was a "bespoke" position created by the SRE team. I set up a continuous build and then fixed bugs until it went green.
Test engineers at Google at the time (~2008) were expected to build test infrastructure, rather than writing unit tests (SWEs were expected to write unit tests and integration tests), or to build complex system tests.
Yeah that sounds pretty familiar to my experience! Right now I'm in an infra team and work on the CI pipelines, testing frameworks for devs, testing infra, etc... So more time dealing with docker/k8s than a unit testing framework that's for sure!
