FWIW, Google generally expect engineers to know bit manipulation. Certainly I was asked some, I don't know if everyone necessarily is but I wouldn't be surprised if they were.
NOTE: if you are a Java developer, make sure you remember that bytes are signed! (I have no idea who thought that one was a good idea)
And rather amusingly (and if I remember correctly...) the char data type in Java is not really the equivalent of char in the other C derivatives.