Google engineer shares what changed his career path: ‘I wasn't qualified for the role’ | Today News

When Emrick Donadei first joined Google, artificial intelligence was not part of his role. Like many engineers at the company a few years ago, his work had nothing to do with large language models or AI safety.

“I wasn't qualified for an AI role,” Donadei, now 32 and based in New York, told Business Insider. “I didn’t have the right credentials, and when I spoke with other teams, I felt a disconnect.”

Today, he works as a software engineer on Google’s AI safety team — a role he did not enter through a formal AI degree or promotion.

Donadei says the shift began when ChatGPT’s launch pushed Google to move faster on large language models. As the company opened internal pathways for engineers to change teams, he became interested — but unsure if he belonged.

“Fundamentally, it’s similar to my last role,” he said. “But instead of building software, I’m building LLMs, which requires data, training, and compute.”

At that point, he had no direct experience working with AI products, making discussions with AI teams challenging.

Donadei believes rising demand helped, but effort mattered just as much.

“I was at the right company at a time when demand was high,” he said. “But also because I decided to participate in a hackathon.”

That decision, he says, changed everything.

“I think hackathons are the best way for everybody to get into AI,” Donadei told Business Insider.

He was no stranger to such events, having won Amazon-led hackathons in 2018 and 2019. When Google announced its seven-day internal hackathon in 2024, he saw an opportunity to work on what he called “the hottest topic in the industry.”

During the event, Donadei created a small prototype and presented a demo at the end. He says the aim was never to build something groundbreaking.

“I didn’t do anything revolutionary,” Donadei said. “I built a small prototype that wasn’t super useful, but it was a good way to get started.”

The experience forced him to learn unfamiliar tools, including LLM infrastructure, agent-based workflows and model fine-tuning — “The things that are less sexy,” he added.

“You can’t just do a hackathon and stop there,” he said. “You have to actually leverage that experience.”

Instead of shelving the project, he actively spoke about it. He contacted technical leads across Google to present his work, using short meetings to see whether it matched their teams’ goals.

“They tend to have a high-level view,” he said.

These discussions helped him expand his internal network and clearly explain how his work fit into Google’s wider AI plans.

In 2025, Donadei took part in another hackathon. That project later resulted in a public technical disclosure from Google, further strengthening his position in the AI space.

Alongside internal projects, Donadei pushed himself to keep learning. He uses AI tools daily to speed up his understanding.

He relies on Claude Code to read documentation, Gemini and ChatGPT Deep Research for case studies, and NotebookLM to handle large volumes of information. He also watches Andrej Karpathy’s YouTube lectures and co-hosts a podcast on software engineering and AI.

“We’re doing it mostly because it’s the most proactive way for us to keep learning,” he said.

Looking back, Donadei does not describe his transition as pure luck. Instead, he believes action made the difference.

“By granting me unlimited access to frontier technologies and a direct line to key decision-makers,” he said, “the hackathon proved that I wasn’t late to the AI revolution.”