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S T O R Y PHOTOS BY CHRIS MORTENSON
Opening Doors Google engineer Chris Clark aims to ‘be a beacon for folks who look like me’
Chris Clark is a Google engineer at the company’s Venice office, where he builds tools and software for other developers to use such as a metrics system to assess the health of Google products. By Marin Heinritz hris Clark spent much of his early life feeling like an outsider. As a Black kid who attended Catholic elementary school, he received messages from his friends in the Compton neighborhood where he grew up such as, “Why do you talk white?” and “You obviously don’t belong here.” Then when his family moved to Diamond Bar shortly after the 1992 riots, Clark remembered saying hello to white neighbors next door and within a week or two they moved out. “It wasn’t direct racism, but it was racism,” Clark said. Now a software engineer in tools and infrastructure at Google, based in their Venice office, Clark is very much an insider and living his dream. But it wasn’t exactly easy to get there. Clark always had a proclivity for STEM subjects in school,
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but it wasn’t until his Uncle John who worked in IT moved in with the family for six months that he found a mentor who showed him what was possible for him. “He saw in me that I was interested in the space,” Clark recalled. His uncle helped him put together computers as a side hustle, took him to computer fairs and helped him get an internship at his company En Point Technologies, which was a graduation requirement for Troy Tech, the magnet high school he attended in Fullerton. In 2003, Clark began at UCLA. “When I started at UCLA, when I walked into a classroom of 300 to 400 people I’d look around and I wouldn’t see anyone who looked like me,” he said. As a first-generation college student, it was challenging to not see himself reflected in his classmates or his professors.
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“I would feel a lot of imposter syndrome naturally,” Clark said. But having broken down those mental barriers to successfully make it through his education and career, he’s made it his mission to make sure others, like him, know there’s a place for them. “I think the goal for me is to just build that sense of community in a tech space so that people understand that people who look like me are out there and are doing positive things,” Clark said. When Clark graduated from UCLA in 2008, he started at Microsoft in Seattle, working at a top-tier company right out of the gate. And in February 2011, he moved to Google’s Venice office and has been there ever since. While he simply loves his job building tools and software for other developers to use and thrives on seeing the fruits of
his labor, such as a metrics system he built to assess the health of Google products that’s been used worldwide and now has a dedicated team working on continuing to build on his original idea, what’s even more empowering and humbling to Clark is helping pave the way for others. “My real goal in general in my career is to be a beacon for folks who look like me, to reinforce and show that there’s a place for them in tech and in top-tier companies like Google,” he said. Building on the momentum of last year’s $50 million grant to 10 HBCUs, on Feb. 9 Google announced a new $6 million investment in The Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF) and United Negro College Fund (UNCF), with the intention to continue finding more ways to provide the tools, resources and opportunities necessary to ensure tech’s
workforce better represents the communities that use their products every day. And Clark has been a strong driving force in increasing Black representation in Google’s Venice office. He served as the co-leader of the local Black Googler Network employee resource group, creating opportunities to increase connectivity and build community. He also launched a summer intern outreach program. Every year pre-pandemic, he would connect interns from underrepresented groups with engineers for open conversations and fun events. For six years, Clark co-led monthly Blacks in Tech (now Blacks United in Leading Technology/BUiLT) meetups. These 30 to 60-person events were a collaboration between Google and Raytheon that provided a space for members of the Black community to connect over
