>> During my career there

I certainly read that as "there" being the town, not the actual data center!

" I remember we hired a local who'd grown up in the town and he was "really surprised" when he started to see what we were doing to remain efficient"

That makes it very clear he was an employee of Google working at the data center.

Same, but revisiting it with context, it does seem mostly obvious enough.

Written communication is hard

He specifically said he worked there. Did you think perhaps he possibly worked for the outsourced cleaning crew?

The use of the word "we" seems pretty clear to me.