[skylark]

You're half right. Google doesn't hire purely frontend engineers. They have a job listing for them, but once inside everyone gets the same title: Software Engineer.

At Google, the "frontend" work also usually includes the server which serves the frontend code - this means engineers need to be not only capable at UI development, but also be familiar with the Java systems that exist at Google.

From this perspective, frontend at Google is indeed similar to a full stack role at most startups running on AWS or GCP. Backend at Google is more like working on AWS itself.