By Ty Burke
In celebration of Carleton University’s 2023 Throwback week–a homecoming for alumni and community members–we sat down with seven alumni to see where they are now. Their stories moved us and reminded us of the impact our engineering and design alumni have on creating technology for good, sustainability, health and wellness, and social innovation.
Unlocking the Power of Google Cloud
Google’s enterprise services allow companies to leverage the scale of one of the world’s largest tech companies. But the full potential of its suite of products isn’t self-evident. That’s where Nick De Cristofaro comes in. The Carleton alumnus is a customer engineer, and helps companies understand what Google Cloud can do for them.
“Google operates products and services at hyperscale. Some are used by billions of active users every day,” says De Cristofaro.
Customer engineers work with businesses early in the sales process, and help them understand how products and infrastructure can help them solve business problems.
“They can consume computing services, deploy virtual machines, and potentially use analytical tools to analyze large amounts of data. It is very technical, and very tied to my Carleton Bachelor of Information Technology in networking technology,” says De Cristofaro.
Nick De Cristofaro, customer engineer, Google Cloud, information technology alumnus.
“I do exactly what I studied. I apply my networking background and skills every day because I’m focused on selling our cloud networking products and services. I need to understand the core concepts of how networks operate.”
Getting hired at Google was a dream come true for De Cristofaro, but it didn’t happen right away. He spent eight years working at Ericsson, and unsuccessfully applied to Google twice before he was hired.
“The catalyst was that I showed a lot of initiative. In my spare time, I built an application with Google Cloud products, a pipeline that automatically published data from a temperature sensor,” says De Cristofaro.
“I wanted to learn Google products and services, and I’m not a software engineer, so it was relatively basic. There was a bit of code and some scripts. But it wowed the recruiter that I’d taught myself without having any prior background in this platform. They pushed me through the process because they didn’t see candidates do this often.”
Want to participate in Carleton’s 2023 Throwback events? Visit the alumni website to learn more.
Wednesday, September 20, 2023 in Alumni, Feature Stories
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