By Ana Altchek
Publication Date: 2026-01-02 10:33:00
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Emrick Donadei, a 32-year-old software engineer at Google, based in New York. His identity and employment have been verified by Business Insider. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
When I started at Google a few years ago, my role was completely unrelated to AI.
When ChatGPT came out, Google started to focus more on LLMs and opened up more opportunities in the company to switch roles. Similar to others, I became more interested in exploring area.
A few months ago, I switched to an AI role. Now I’m a software engineer working on AI safety. Fundamentally, it’s similar to my last role, but instead of building software, I’m building LLMs, which requires data, training, and compute.
Initially, I didn’t think I could get a role working in AI. I didn’t have the right credentials and when I spoke with other teams, I felt a disconnect because I hadn’t even touched the products, let alone…
