Google's hiring process is notoriously bureaucratic, and one of the things that they ask you when you make it into compensation committee is "Do you know any Google employees?" It feels great to say "Well, when I worked on chromium, I interacted with [name], [name], and [name]."

You should also know that they're super cool about letting you get into the AUTHORS file, you just have to write good code that they can use, and they'll insist that you add yourself as part of the patch.