{"id":32233,"date":"2023-09-20T14:46:35","date_gmt":"2023-09-20T18:46:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/its-cuthemedev1.carleton.ca\/engineering-design\/?post_type=cu_story&p=32233"},"modified":"2025-03-24T15:29:05","modified_gmt":"2025-03-24T19:29:05","slug":"unlocking-the-power-of-google-cloud-a-journey-from-networking-to-customer-engineering","status":"publish","type":"cu_story","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/engineering-design\/story\/unlocking-the-power-of-google-cloud-a-journey-from-networking-to-customer-engineering\/","title":{"rendered":"Unlocking the Power of Google Cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n
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\n Unlocking the Power of Google Cloud\n <\/h1>\n \n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n \n

Ty Burke<\/em><\/p>\n \n

We sat down with Nick De Cristofaro, an alumnus of our network technology program, to learn what he has been up to since graduation. His story reminds us of the impact our engineering and design alumni have on creating technology for good, sustainability, health and wellness, and social innovation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlocking the Power of Google Cloud<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Google\u2019s enterprise services allow companies to leverage the scale of one of the world\u2019s largest tech companies. But the full potential of its suite of products isn\u2019t self-evident. That\u2019s where Nick De Cristofaro comes in. The Carleton alumnus is a customer engineer, and helps companies understand what Google Cloud can do for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGoogle operates products and services at hyperscale. Some are used by billions of active users every day,\u201d says De Cristofaro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Customer engineers work with businesses early in the sales process, and help them understand how products and infrastructure can help them solve business problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey 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,\u201d says De Cristofaro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Nick De Cristofaro, customer engineer, Google Cloud, information technology alumnus.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Getting hired at Google was a dream come true for De Cristofaro, but it didn\u2019t happen right away. He spent eight years working at Ericsson, and unsuccessfully applied to Google twice before he was hired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe 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,\u201d says De Cristofaro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI wanted to learn Google products and services, and I\u2019m 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\u2019d 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ty Burke We sat down with Nick De Cristofaro, an alumnus of our network technology program, to learn what he has been up to since graduation. His story reminds 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32237,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"cu_story_type":[249,193],"cu_story_tag":[],"class_list":["post-32233","cu_story","type-cu_story","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","cu_story_type-alumni","cu_story_type-feature-stories"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":"blueprint"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/engineering-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/32233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/engineering-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/engineering-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/cu_story"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/engineering-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/engineering-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/32233\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35684,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/engineering-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/32233\/revisions\/35684"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/engineering-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/engineering-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"cu_story_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/engineering-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_type?post=32233"},{"taxonomy":"cu_story_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/engineering-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_tag?post=32233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}