Google was a good place to work as an SRE. I think the software devs (SWE) were also pretty happy. Most of the backend work at Google is designing, scaling, and running very large systems with a lot of requirements. Every product has to at least have a plan for serving billions of users around the world which means GDPR and local laws and the privacy and security requirements of being the biggest target for governments, hackers, and spammers. The tooling (build systems, linters, static analysis, profilers, tracing, deployment, monitoring, security, storage, and libraries) is fantastic.
From what I saw, everyone was quite intelligent and most were also very kind and well-rounded people. Every engineer you talk to will have a strong grasp of algorithms and data structures, usually strong math and statistics background, and plenty of language, kernel, and operating system authors and research scientists will be your (extended) coworkers. I felt like I was somewhere around the 40th percentile in ability/outcomes which is a big change coming from smaller software companies or IT where Google-level engineering skill is rare. Imposter syndrome is a thing when your best efforts fit neatly into median performance with a lot of other high-performers, so expect that and don't let it bother you.
Growth at Google means ability to grow in the global SWE/SRE market; you have to be in the top ~0.001% percent of engineers worldwide to get into very senior technical roles. There are still lots of rewarding roles as a L4 or L5 individual contributor.
I left because it's much easier to get promo by interview (with another company) than through the perf process and after 4 years the stock grant cliff without promo was a bit more stark than it is now, I hear.
If you can manage it, get hired in the U.S. or transfer once hired. London and other non-U.S. salaries are quite a bit lower, very unfortunately and unfairly in my opinion. Global labor markets are weird.