This is partly a labour law thing. The EU benefits from freedom of movement and work, so people can apply to different countries without worrying about immigration. Residents outside the EU (third countries) may have to prove why they'd be a better choice than an EU applicant; rather the onus is on the company. That will also depend on the role and the employee but generally companies will prefer to hire locally if they have international offices. It's easier to move an existing employee to a different country than hire internationally, usually there are specific visas for that case.

Acquaintance over at Google in the Pacific Northwest works on invoicing so I can believe that that's true without even leaving the country.

Google Zurich is the European research hub. They do a lot of very cool stuff, particularly mobile deep learning. Salaries are commensurate with the Bay Area, but Switzerland is as if not more expensive (though arguably higher standard of living than SF). Zurich in particular gets a lot of engineering talent out of places like ETH.

No, lots of interesting Google teams in EMEA, for example Lens https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/90450385816167110-pr...

No. The top managers are in silicon valley, but the key engineers and product people are distributed.

Hey, maintaining GCP is probably more interesting than you think ;)