Google Software Engineer Samriddhi Sharma Shares Career Advice for Young Engineering Graduates

Building a successful career in technology does not always require a perfectly planned roadmap, according to Samriddhi Sharma, a software engineer whose journey from college internships to a full-time role at Google offers lessons for aspiring developers. Her advice to young graduates is to focus on learning, make the most of current opportunities and allow professional experience to shape their next steps.

Sharma graduated from the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Jabalpur, with a specialisation in Electronics and Communication Engineering. Despite her academic background outside traditional computer science, she developed experience in software engineering and secured multiple opportunities with Google before joining the company as a full-time employee.

Her journey highlights how internships, technical projects and involvement in college programming activities can help students explore career options and build practical skills.

From student internships to a full-time software engineering role

Sharma joined Google's Student Training in Engineering Program in 2024. The programme gave her an opportunity to gain industry experience while still developing her technical abilities.

She returned for a software engineering internship in 2025, working on projects involving data pipelines and real-time dashboards. Her work included extracting useful information from system logs and helping teams understand performance-related issues.

During her earlier internship, she contributed to work involving storage quotas, with a focus on improving reliability and protecting sensitive customer workflows in production environments.

After completing the internship, Sharma joined a financial technology company before securing a full-time software engineering position at Google. Her progression demonstrates that career paths can include several stages rather than a direct transition from college to a long-term role.

Instead of following a predetermined plan, she built experience through successive opportunities and continued to develop her technical capabilities.

How college activities helped develop practical skills

Sharma's preparation extended beyond classroom learning. She was a core team member of BitByte, the programming club at her college, where she helped organise coding competitions and beginner-level workshops.

Such activities gave students opportunities to practise programming, collaborate with peers and introduce newcomers to technical problem-solving. Participating in competitions also allowed aspiring developers to test their knowledge outside regular academic assignments.

Sharma won HackCBS 7.0, where she worked on a peer-to-peer resource-sharing platform. She was also a finalist in the Google Girl Hackathon and received the Google Women Techmakers Engineering Fellowship.

These experiences reflect the value of applying technical knowledge to practical challenges. Projects and competitions can help students understand how software concepts work in real situations while developing teamwork, communication and problem-solving abilities.

Her technical interests include system design, distributed computing and resource optimisation. She has experience with programming languages and technologies such as Python, C, Java, JavaScript, React and the MERN stack.

Advice for students entering the technology industry

Sharma's central message is that students do not need to decide every stage of their professional lives before beginning their careers. Trying to predict every future move can distract them from opportunities and skills available in the present.

For engineering students, this means concentrating on manageable goals: strengthening programming fundamentals, building projects, learning from internships and seeking opportunities to work with others. These experiences can help students discover their strengths and identify areas where they need further development.

Internships are particularly useful because they expose students to professional workflows and practical engineering problems that may differ from academic exercises. College clubs, hackathons and collaborative projects can provide additional ways to develop these abilities.

Her experience also illustrates why graduates should remain open to opportunities that do not fit their original expectations. A degree, internship or first job does not have to determine an entire career.

For young engineers navigating a competitive employment market, the broader lesson is to keep learning, build experience consistently and focus on the work immediately in front of them. A career can take shape through a series of informed decisions, even when the final destination is not clear at the beginning.