Google hires 22-year Mumbai engineer for AI research role in New York, will pay him salary of Rs 1.2 crore

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Bagging a job at Google is every engineer's dream. Aditya Paliwal, a student of International Institute of Information Technology-Bangalore (IIIT-B), had the same dream. And for him now it is coming true, and rich rewards attached to it. Google has hired Aditya, a 22-year-old M Tech student in Computer Science at IIT-B, to be a part of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) research wing in New York. Aditya will be paid an annual salary of Rs 1.2 crore to start with. Aditya will join Google on July 18.

"The Google offer did not come easy," Aditya told The News Minute in an interview. The Mumbai-based student beat around 6,000 students from across the globe to clear the preliminary round of the selection process and was in the top 50 finalists in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.

Out of the 50 students who managed to get a job at Google's AI Research wing, five are from India. Aditya is one of them.

Explaining his journey throughout the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, Aditya told media, "It's open to all students across the world and you apply with your resume along with a Statement of Purpose and a recommendation letter. Based on this they shortlist you, and there are subsequent rounds of interviews and at the end of it, you get the job."

"Usually, after a CS degree, people get a proper engineering job but this is a job in the research domain. So more than common problems, it is more about trying to solve open problems and shortlisting potential future problems and finding answers to them," he said.

Aditya was introduced to coding when he was in Class 8, but back then for him it was a passive interest. He goes on to explain in the interview that his love and interest for coding grew when he cleared the IIT-JEE examination and secured a seat in IIIT-B.

Aditya finished his integrated M Tech course in Computer Science at IIT-B this year. "After coming into the college, the curriculum and the environment made the passive interest grow into an active interest," he said.

Aditya added that he felt AI was the future and with some more effort there was a lot of scope around AI. "I had a couple of papers and after AI came, I felt like that the field is progressing rapidly and I got the confidence that with a little bit of effort in research we can do a lot more in the future," he told the NewsMinute.

As a student, Aditya's focus was never the job, but to learn new concepts. "I never worried about it (getting a job) too much. I knew I would always have one year at the end of the course to prepare to refocus on employment tests. So the focus was mostly on learning as many things as possible and meeting interesting people and ideas. The goal was to develop new interests and master a few," Aditya said.

But on getting through one of the top tech companies -- Google -- in the world, Aditya does feel that it's a big deal for him.

Even after bagging a job at Google's AI wing, Aditya says that he's still open to learning. On asking about his current professional goals Aditya said, "At this moment, I can't really tell. There are vague ideas here and there but nothing concrete. All I want to do is learn the maximum as I can and meet as many interesting people as I can."