More than 10 months after announcing plans to bring an engineering hub to Durham, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has opened its initial office and hiring is starting to accelerate.
The company currently has 67 open jobs listed in Durham – 56 of which are in engineering, according to the California-based tech giant's careers site. A Google spokesman declined to be specific about the current head count in Durham. The company, when announcing the Durham hub, said it could eventually employ more than 1,000 workers.
Google's goal was to hire 100 people in 2021, according to a memo recently released by Gov. Roy Cooper’s office via a public records request. The Google spokesman would not confirm that figure but said the company has exceeded its goal.
Google – unlike many other big projects announced in 2021 – did not pursue state incentives, meaning it will not be held to task when it comes to job-creation pledges.
The hub, which opened at 200 W. Morris Street in the Durham Innovation District last month, was announced in March 2021 and was four years in the making.
It started with a visit to Silicon Valley, according to a memo sent out by Ken Eudy, Cooper’s now-retired top adviser. In a series of communications sent out a week before Google’s Durham announcement, Eudy credited Cooper’s 2018 visit to California with clinching the investment.
“All this started when gov visited Google,” he wrote to colleagues.
In his emails, Eudy said Google was bringing between 100 and 150 jobs to Durham, but the company's March 18 announcement said the hub “will eventually support more than 1,000 jobs and grow into one of Google Cloud’s top five engineering hubs in the U.S. joining the Bay Area, New York, Seattle and Kirkland, Washington."
The new tranche of public documents was released this week by Cooper’s office following a records request from several months ago. They show the point person on Google’s end was Lilyn Hester, Google’s head of external affairs, public policy and government relations for the Southeast.
A few months after the announcement, five-year company veteran Kamala Subramaniam was named Google engineering site lead for Durham.
The company signed on to sublease space from Duke University at 200 Morris St. Google has not revealed plans for its permanent space in Durham, but the Triangle Business Journal previously reported the company is eyeing the upcoming expansion at American Tobacco Campus.
