Right and Craig Chambers later joined Google. He led/developed Flume [1] (a Java framework on top of MapReduce) and the unfortunately named Cloud Dataflow [2] (which aims at unifying streaming and batch computation)
I say unfortunate because pretty much all the big data frameworks could be called "cloud dataflow", including TensorFlow itself.
People using Google Cloud might recognize the name of VP Urs Hoezle, who worked on the OO language Self in the 90's with a lot of the same people [3].
And AFAIK that's where v8 came from... Urs hired his former colleague Lars Bak and told him to write a fast JavaScript interpreter for Chrome.
[1] https://research.google.com/pubs/pub35650.html [2] https://research.google.com/pubs/pub43864.html [3] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=619798
Wasn't V8 developed by Bak & co in a separate company, which was bought by Google? (Didn't find any source, but based on what I thought I read in the news at that time ...)
v8 wasn't developed by a separate company, but Bak did bring at least one of his colleagues along to Google (I'm pretty sure just as new employees to Google). And he had another company that worked on a SmallTalk VM called OOVM, targeted at embedded devices, right before he joined Google:
https://astares.blogspot.com/2012/04/inside-oovm.html
However it apparently wasn't acquired by Google:
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20040727005088/en/Esme...
Other discussion:
Google hires a lot of PL PhDs to do work that isn't very related to PL (we joke about PL PhDs working on ads a lot). One could guess that they just make good developers because of their experience, but the specific knowledge might not be much in demand.