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Google Ann Arbor: Inside the 2300 Traverwood Ads Engineering Hub

Google's 2300 Traverwood campus is a 135,000 sq ft Ads engineering and IT hub with 400+ employees, anchoring North Campus tech in Ann Arbor.

A2Hub Editorial· Rusty Roof Media· Updated May 4, 2026

Google Ann Arbor

By A2Hub Editorial. Published 2026-04-22. Last updated: 2026-04-22.

At a glance

  • Office: 2300 Traverwood Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48105
  • Square footage: 135,000 (Traverwood campus)
  • Employees: 400+ at the Ann Arbor office
  • Function: Google Ads engineering, Ads support and operations, internal IT
  • Opened (current campus): 2017; Google's first Ann Arbor office opened 2006 in McKinley Towne Centre downtown
  • Distinction: One of two global Google internal IT hubs
  • Parent: Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL, GOOG)
  • Careers: google.com/about/careers/applications/locations/ann-arbor

Google's Midwest Ads engineering hub

Google has been in Ann Arbor for two decades, and the 2300 Traverwood Drive campus is the most consequential satellite engineering office Google operates between the coasts. The Ann Arbor headcount sits north of 400 across Ads engineering, Ads operations, and one of Google's two global internal IT hubs. The 135,000 square foot Traverwood campus opened in 2017 after the Ann Arbor team outgrew the original downtown footprint at McKinley Towne Centre, where Google had operated since 2006.

The office is a product of Larry Page's University of Michigan ties. Page took his BS in Computer Engineering at U-M in 1995, served as president of the Eta Kappa Nu chapter, ran with the U-M solar car team, and gave the 2009 commencement address. When Google opened a Michigan office in 2006, the AdWords engineering function landed in Ann Arbor and never left. AdWords is now Google Ads, but the function and the city pairing has held for 20 years.

Founding story: AdWords, Larry Page, and the McKinley years

Google's Ann Arbor presence began in 2006 inside McKinley Towne Centre at 401 East Liberty Street, downtown. The initial team was small, focused on AdWords engineering and customer support, and was the first significant Google office in the Midwest. The hire-out happened fast: by the late 2000s Ann Arbor was the home of a meaningful chunk of Google's small-business AdWords go-to-market function, with engineering responsibilities increasing year over year.

The McKinley office grew from a few dozen employees in 2006 into one of Google's mid-sized US offices by the mid-2010s. By the time Google announced the move to a purpose-built campus on Traverwood Drive in 2014, the Ann Arbor team had effectively outgrown a downtown floor-by-floor expansion path. The new 135,000 sq ft Traverwood campus opened in 2017 on the North Campus / Plymouth Road corridor, a few miles from the U-M central campus and near the site KLA would later select for its second US headquarters.

The 2014 site selection had a counterfactual. Google could have left for a coast or for one of the larger Midwestern metros. It did not, in part because the Ann Arbor team had grown into a stable, productive Ads engineering and operations center, and in part because U-M continues to feed the office a reliable annual cohort of new graduates.

What the office does

Three primary functions sit at 2300 Traverwood: Google Ads engineering, Ads operations and support, and internal IT.

Google Ads engineering. A meaningful share of the global engineering work behind Google Ads small-business product surfaces is built and maintained from the Ann Arbor office. That includes campaign management surfaces, machine learning infrastructure for ad targeting and bidding, and integration work with Google's broader ads stack. The Ann Arbor engineering presence is one of the larger Ads engineering footprints outside Mountain View.

Ads operations and support. The office hosts Ads support and operations functions for North America and adjacent markets, including agency and advertiser support roles that require deep product expertise.

Internal IT. Ann Arbor is one of Google's two global internal IT operations hubs, a function that supports Google's own internal infrastructure (corporate network, employee software, IT support for Googlers worldwide). That designation is a tell: Google trusts its Ann Arbor talent base with the systems Google itself runs on.

The office also hosts smaller teams in adjacent functions including data center operations support, partnerships, and legal-adjacent work.

The 2300 Traverwood campus

The current Ann Arbor campus is purpose-built. 135,000 square feet across a low-rise modern campus in the North Campus / Plymouth Road corridor. The site sits on land formerly part of the Pfizer Ann Arbor research footprint that came onto the market after Pfizer closed its Ann Arbor R&D operations in 2007. Google built the facility to its standard playbook: open floor plans, micro-kitchens, on-site fitness, child care subsidies, the entire Googler benefits package.

The Traverwood location matters strategically because it puts Google in the same corridor as KLA's Ann Arbor R&D campus, the U-M North Campus, and a number of small mobility startups operating out of nearby flex-tech space. Google does not engage publicly with the local tech scene at the same density as Duo Security or Menlo Innovations, but the office's hiring pulls steady attention from the U-M engineering pipeline.

Larry Page's Ann Arbor

The Ann Arbor footprint cannot be told without the Larry Page biographical thread. Page enrolled at U-M and earned a BS in Computer Engineering in 1995. He sat on the Solar Car Team. He led the Eta Kappa Nu honor society chapter at U-M. He went on to Stanford for graduate work where he met Sergey Brin, co-founded Google, and the rest is the history. Page received an honorary doctorate from U-M in 2009 and gave the U-M commencement speech that year. He sits on the U-M College of Engineering National Advisory Committee.

That biographical thread is part of the reason Google ended up in Ann Arbor and the reason the office has stayed. It is not the whole reason (the U-M engineering pipeline alone would justify a Google office anywhere it landed in Michigan), but it is part of the explanatory pattern.

Hiring and the U-M pipeline

Google Ann Arbor recruits heavily from the University of Michigan College of Engineering, with a smaller pull from Michigan State, Wayne State, and out-of-state schools. The office runs intern cohorts every summer, almost all from U-M, and converts a respectable share of them to full-time hires. The Ann Arbor office is one of the more attractive Google placements for engineers who want Google's compensation and benefits without the Bay Area cost of living, and the conversion rate from U-M intern to Ann Arbor full-time reflects that.

For Ann Arbor's broader tech labor market, Google's presence functions as a salary anchor. Senior software engineering compensation in town tends to benchmark against Google's local pay band, which is at the high end of the Ann Arbor market. Glassdoor data through 2025 has Google Ann Arbor compensation in the $200K-plus range for senior software engineering roles when stock and bonus are included.

Culture and hiring

Google Ann Arbor hires across senior software engineering (full stack, backend, frontend, infrastructure, security), technical program management, product management, UX research and design, data science, and sales engineering. Role mix is senior-heavy. Entry-level hiring is smaller than at Google's coastal campuses but consistent through the U-M new-grad pipeline via the standard Google SWE-I and APM programs.

Work model has evolved with Google's broader return-to-office policy. As of 2026 most Ann Arbor roles operate on a hybrid schedule with specific in-office days.

Glassdoor and public employee commentary trend in line with Google broadly: strong compensation, strong benefits, strong peers, a bureaucracy that has thickened over the past five years, and performance management pressure that tracks the broader Alphabet environment post-2023. Total compensation for senior engineers in Ann Arbor tracks Google's coastal bands with modest cost-of-living adjustments, which in real purchasing terms is one of the strongest packages available in Michigan.

Strategic reading

Google Ann Arbor's position is structurally secure. Ads is the revenue line; internal IT is a foundational function. Neither is a candidate for closure in any reasonable macro scenario. The more interesting question is whether Ann Arbor's charter shifts over time.

AI-driven changes to the Ads product (generative creative, automated campaign optimization, agentic buying) could reshape what the Ann Arbor Ads team specifically works on. That is a positive scenario for the office if it gets in front of new product surfaces, neutral to slightly negative if existing surfaces get consolidated elsewhere.

Internal IT at Google scale is unlikely to contract. If anything, the security and identity surface area grows with scale. Ann Arbor's role as one of two global IT hubs is defensible.

If you're considering an offer

A Google Ann Arbor offer is one of the strongest compensation and stability combinations available in the region. For a senior software engineer weighing a coastal Google role against the Ann Arbor office, the tradeoff is mostly non-compensation.

What you get: near-coastal total comp in a market with dramatically lower cost of living. Access to Google peers and internal tooling. Real stability. Strong benefits. The chance to work on Ads or internal IT at global scale without the Bay Area rent, weather, and commute profile.

What you give up: some promotional velocity. Google's internal promotion dynamics historically reward being in the same building as your VP, and Ann Arbor site directors have had to work harder to surface high-impact projects to Mountain View leadership. That is navigable; it is not free.

Compared to KLA Ann Arbor, Google is the software and consumer-internet anchor and KLA is the hardware and semiconductor anchor. Both are serious. The choice is less about the companies and more about the kind of engineering you want to do.

Why it matters

For 20 years, Google has employed hundreds of engineers in Ann Arbor. That has compounded in three ways.

First, the talent stays. Google alumni in Ann Arbor have founded or joined companies including Voxel51, Censys, Workit Health, May Mobility, and a number of smaller startups. The "ex-Google" tag on a founder LinkedIn in Michigan is meaningful and the Ann Arbor scene has more of those tags than any other city in the Midwest.

Second, the Ann Arbor office is the proof case that a global internet company can run real engineering in a Big Ten college town indefinitely. That has shifted what Ann Arbor SPARK can credibly pitch to other large tech employers. KLA's 2019 site selection for a second US headquarters in Ann Arbor cited the engineering talent depth that Google's two-decade presence had helped build.

Third, the Traverwood campus is one of a very small number of Google offices anywhere in the country with a clean 20-year operating history outside the home regions of Mountain View, NYC, and Seattle. That continuity matters. It is also a reminder that Google's Ann Arbor pull predates the modern Bay Area expansion of the company.

Related

FAQ

Where is Google's Ann Arbor office? 2300 Traverwood Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48105. The 135,000 sq ft campus opened in 2017 on the North Campus / Plymouth Road corridor.

How many employees does Google have in Ann Arbor? Approximately 400 across Google Ads engineering, Ads operations and support, and internal IT.

When did Google open in Ann Arbor? Google's first Ann Arbor office opened in 2006 at McKinley Towne Centre downtown. The team grew there until moving into the purpose-built 2300 Traverwood Drive campus in 2017.

What does Google do in Ann Arbor? The office is a Google Ads engineering hub, an Ads operations and support center, and one of Google's two global internal IT hubs. Engineering work spans campaign management, ad targeting infrastructure, and integration with the broader Google Ads stack.

Why did Google open an office in Ann Arbor? The University of Michigan engineering talent pipeline is the primary reason. Google co-founder Larry Page took his BS in Computer Engineering at U-M in 1995, which contributed to the brand-level pull, but the sustaining factor is U-M's annual output of CS and engineering graduates.

Is Google still hiring in Ann Arbor? Yes. Open positions are posted at google.com/about/careers/applications/locations/ann-arbor and on Google's main careers site filtered by location.