WCU Stories      December 12, 2024

By Cam Adams

Joseph Oladeji is probably feeling lucky.

The soon-to-be Western Carolina University alumnus knows how competitive it is to work for a big tech company and break into the video game industry. But Oladeji isn’t lucky. He’s earned his way to a top-notch job following his time at Cullowhee.

Oladeji will start in January as a software engineer at Google, working specifically with the company’s GKE Games & AI Workloads team. 

“If you think of game companies like Unity and Steam, Google works with them to serve them game servers,” Oladeji said. “That’s a team that I’m specifically working on, and I’m really excited because I really love games.”

Despite this being his first job out of college, Oladeji is no stranger to Google. The Computer Science major interned with the global tech giant each of the last two summers, first with Google Ads in New York City and second with GKE Games & AI Workloads in Seattle.

During this past summer, Oladeji helped work on a party-favorite video game, Mario Kart, and The Finals, a first-person shooter game.

“I know a lot of people don’t get to work on teams of their interest, especially in the software engineering realm,” Oladeji said. “It's kind of scarce in terms of getting a job right now, especially in software engineering, so I’m really just excited to get to work with them.”

While Oladeji will be a bit far from his hometown of Wake Forest, some aspects of his new gig at Google won’t be far off from what he did at WCU.

During a networking class he took at WCU, he worked on a project called “Battleship,” which he said was similar to the work done at Google on a smaller scale. During his time in college, Oladeji learned some about cloud computing, which impressed his manager.

“He was like ‘It’s not common for people to have knowledge about cloud computing coming out of college because cloud computing isn’t taught at the college course level,’” Oladeji said. “It’s mainly like a boot camp or external course.”