Dr Jessica McCarthy will be Google Dublin’s new head of engineering

19 Feb 2021

Dr Jessica McCarthy. Image: Google

A fairly new recruit at Google, Jessica McCarthy is set to bring a commitment to gender equality to her new role.

Dr Jessica McCarthy, a director of engineering at Google, will take over as engineering site lead at Google Dublin later this month. McCarthy will step into her new position on 26 February, succeeding Dave O’Connor.

O’Connor has been at Google almost 17 years so far, starting out as a site reliability manager in 2004. Under his leadership, the engineering team at Google Dublin has grown from a team of 400 to 700.

“I’ve had the benefit of working with Dave since I joined Google, and I look forward to picking up the mantle and continuing to drive the team’s growth,” said McCarthy.

‘Providing support and mentorship to women in STEM at all stages of their careers is something I am passionate about’
– JESSICA MCCARTHY

McCarthy currently holds the position of senior engineering director within site reliability engineering in Google. Her focus has been on the reliability of Google’s global network infrastructure, software and services, and product and search.

She joined Google in 2019 following more than a decade at Intel as a senior staff research scientist and principal investigator with Intel Labs Europe. Her main focus here was on the research and development of future dependable cyber-physical systems for evolving edge networks.

While at Intel, McCarthy was responsible for a number of research collaborations both internally and with external academic and industrial partners. She has also been actively involved with research programmes from the EU, Science Foundation Ireland and the US National Science Foundation. She has authored several scientific papers and holds a number of patents in the fields of IoT, service orchestration and information-centric networking.

McCarthy is also passionate about building a diverse and inclusive talent pipeline in STEM, and has sponsored Google’s scholarship programme for women in computer science in Ireland.

The Generation Google Scholarship sees successful applicants awarded €5,000 per year for the duration of their undergraduate studies. The second year of the programme opened for applications last year.

“Providing support and mentorship to women in STEM at all stages of their careers is something I am passionate about and actively creating opportunities for women in the tech industry, and subsequently promoting gender equality in tech, will continue to be a part of my role at Google,” McCarthy said.

Updated, 12.15pm, 19 February 2021: An earlier version of this article mistakenly stated that Dave O’Connor would be leaving Google. This has been corrected.

Elaine Burke is the host of For Tech’s Sake, a co-production from Silicon Republic and The HeadStuff Podcast Network. She was previously the editor of Silicon Republic.

editorial@siliconrepublic.com