IIIT Jabalpur Graduate’s Google Journey Highlights the Value of Learning and Internships

Building a career in technology does not always follow a straight line. For Samriddhi Sharma, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Information Technology Jabalpur (IIIT Jabalpur), the journey to a full-time software engineering position at Google involved two internships with the technology company, experience in the fintech sector, and years of developing her technical and problem-solving abilities.

Google’s Life at Google account highlighted Sharma’s professional journey in a post on X, drawing attention to the lessons she learnt while moving from college to the technology industry. Her experience offers a practical example of how internships, technical projects, and a willingness to learn can help students prepare for careers in software engineering.

Sharma studied Electronics and Communication Engineering at IIIT Jabalpur. Although her degree was not specifically in computer science, her experience in programming, technical competitions, and software development helped shape her professional direction.

One of the central messages from her journey is that students do not need to determine every stage of their careers before entering the workforce. Developing useful skills, gaining practical experience, and remaining open to new opportunities can be equally important.

How Samriddhi Sharma Joined Google Through Two Internships

According to the career details shared in Google’s post and the information provided in Sharma’s LinkedIn profile, her professional journey included two internships at Google before she joined the company as a full-time software engineer.

Her first opportunity came through Google’s Student Training in Engineering Program (STEP) in 2024. She subsequently completed a software engineering internship at Google in 2025.

After her second internship, Sharma secured a position at a fintech company before returning to Google as a full-time employee. The progression illustrates how professional experience gained at different organisations can contribute to a candidate’s development.

Rather than following a predetermined career plan, Sharma built experience through successive opportunities. Her journey also highlights the potential value of maintaining technical skills and continuing to learn after completing an internship.

For students hoping to enter the technology sector, the sequence offers a useful lesson: an internship can be an important starting point, but it is also an opportunity to learn how software is designed, developed, tested, and maintained in a professional environment.

What Sharma Worked on During Her Google Internships

Sharma’s two Google internships involved different engineering responsibilities, according to the experience details shared in her LinkedIn profile.

2025: Software engineering internship

During her 2025 internship, Sharma worked on automated data pipelines and real-time dashboards. The work involved deriving actionable insights from system logs and helping teams monitor performance.

Automated data pipelines can reduce repetitive manual work by collecting, processing, and transferring information through predefined workflows. Real-time dashboards help engineering teams interpret operational data, identify potential problems, and make informed decisions.

These capabilities are relevant to modern software engineering because large-scale applications generate substantial amounts of operational information. Engineers need effective ways to monitor system behaviour and identify performance issues.

The experience provided Sharma with exposure to engineering work involving data processing, monitoring, and performance analysis.

2024: Google STEP internship

Earlier, Sharma participated in Google’s Student Training in Engineering Program in 2024. Her work involved redesigning storage quotas to improve reliability and protect sensitive customer workflows in production environments.

Storage quotas help manage the amount of data or storage resources available to particular users, services, or applications. Designing these systems requires engineers to consider resource limits, reliability, and the potential consequences of failures.

Working on such problems can help students understand why software engineering involves more than writing code. Production systems also require careful design, testing, monitoring, and attention to the reliability of services used by customers.

Together, Sharma’s reported internship projects demonstrate experience with two important areas of software engineering: operational data and the reliability of production systems.

How College Competitions and Hackathons Helped Shape Her Career

Google’s Life at Google post also highlighted the importance of college competitions and hackathons in Sharma’s development.

Hackathons provide opportunities for students to turn an idea into a working prototype within a limited period. Participants often need to understand a problem, divide responsibilities, select appropriate technologies, and demonstrate how their solutions work.

These experiences can help aspiring engineers practise several skills simultaneously, including programming, debugging, collaboration, technical communication, and problem-solving.

Sharma’s achievements include winning HackCBS 7.0, a hackathon organised by Major League Hacking, where she worked on a scalable peer-to-peer resource-sharing platform.

She was also a finalist in the Google Girl Hackathon and a Google Women Techmakers Engineering Fellowship scholar.

Such achievements provide additional context for her technical journey. Competitions can give students opportunities to experiment with technologies, collaborate with peers, and build projects that demonstrate their abilities beyond academic coursework.

However, participation alone does not guarantee a job at a major technology company. The value of a hackathon depends on what a participant learns, builds, and can explain about the resulting project.

From BitByte to Technical Leadership at IIIT Jabalpur

Beyond internships and competitions, Sharma was a core team member of BitByte, the programming club at IIIT Jabalpur.

Her responsibilities included organising coding contests, leading workshops for beginners, and encouraging innovation among students interested in programming and competitive coding.

These activities represent another aspect of technical development: contributing to a community of learners.

Organising coding competitions requires coordination and planning, while beginner workshops involve explaining technical concepts in a way that others can understand. Both activities can help students strengthen their communication, teamwork, and leadership abilities.

For engineering students, participation in programming clubs can also create opportunities to collaborate on projects, learn from peers, and become more comfortable discussing technical problems.

The experience is particularly relevant for students who want to build a professional portfolio while still in college. A combination of personal projects, community contributions, and practical engineering experience can help demonstrate a broader set of abilities.

Technical Skills and Areas of Interest

Sharma’s listed technical skills include Python, C, Java, JavaScript, React, and the MERN stack. Her areas of interest include system design, distributed computing, and resource optimisation.

These technologies and subjects cover several parts of software development.

• Programming languages: Python, C, and Java are used across different areas of software development, from automation and application development to systems programming.
• Web development: JavaScript and React are commonly used to build interactive web applications. The MERN stack combines MongoDB, Express.js, React, and Node.js to support full-stack JavaScript development.
• System design: This discipline focuses on the architecture of software systems, including scalability, reliability, data management, and performance.
• Distributed computing: Distributed systems coordinate multiple computers or services to perform tasks, process data, and deliver applications.
• Resource optimisation: This involves making effective use of computing resources such as storage, memory, processing capacity, and network bandwidth.

For students preparing for software engineering internships, these subjects can provide a foundation for practical projects and technical interviews. The most useful learning path will depend on the roles they intend to pursue, the technologies they already understand, and the kinds of problems they want to solve.

What Students Can Learn from Samriddhi Sharma’s Career Journey

Sharma’s experience offers several practical lessons for students who want to build careers in software engineering.

1. Focus on the next achievable step

Students sometimes feel pressure to choose a specialisation or establish a complete career plan before they have enough experience to make an informed decision.

Sharma’s advice challenges that approach. She said she wished she had spent less time trying to map out her entire career.

Her message was: “You don’t need to have your entire career mapped out. Take one step at a time, make the most of where you are, and trust that your experiences will help shape where you go next.”

The lesson is not to abandon planning. Instead, students can set clear short-term goals while remaining flexible about opportunities that may emerge as they gain experience.

2. Build projects that demonstrate problem-solving

Technical projects allow candidates to demonstrate how they approach real problems. A useful project should explain the problem being addressed, the design decisions involved, the technologies selected, and the results achieved.

Students can begin with small applications and gradually work towards more complex systems. Improving an existing project can also be valuable because it provides opportunities to practise testing, debugging, documentation, and performance improvements.

3. Treat internships as learning opportunities

An internship provides exposure to professional engineering practices that may be difficult to reproduce through classroom assignments alone.

Students can use internships to learn how development teams review code, manage tasks, investigate failures, document systems, and collaborate with colleagues.

They should also try to understand the purpose of their work rather than focusing only on completing assigned tasks.

4. Participate in technical communities

Programming clubs, hackathons, open-source projects, and peer-learning groups can help students practise collaboration and learn from others.

These activities may also provide opportunities to receive feedback, develop communication skills, and explore technologies beyond their academic curriculum.

5. Keep learning after securing an opportunity

Technology changes continuously, and professional development does not stop after receiving an internship offer or a full-time job.

Building a lasting career requires engineers to deepen their understanding of existing technologies, learn new tools when necessary, and develop the ability to solve unfamiliar problems.

Sharma’s journey highlights the importance of treating each professional experience as an opportunity to grow.

A Career Built One Step at a Time

Samriddhi Sharma’s journey from IIIT Jabalpur to Google brings together several elements of professional development: technical learning, internships, hackathon experience, community participation, and exposure to real-world engineering challenges.

Her path also demonstrates that career progression can involve changes in direction. Two Google internships, a role in the fintech sector, and a subsequent full-time position formed different stages of her professional journey.

For students aspiring to work in software engineering, the broader takeaway is practical. Developing technical competence, building meaningful projects, learning from experienced engineers, and making the most of available opportunities can help create a stronger foundation for future roles.

A successful career does not always require knowing every destination in advance. Sometimes, progress comes from understanding the opportunity in front of you and using it to prepare for the next one.