Principal Engineer, Google Compute Platform Security

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:

* Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent

practical experience.

* 15 years of professional software development experience, or 13 years with an

advanced degree.

* Experience architecting, developing, and securing low-level systems software

across the virtualization and operating systems stack (e.g., hypervisors such

as KVM/Cloud Hypervisor/QEMU, Linux kernel internals, VMMs, firmware, or

hardware-assisted virtualization).

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

* Advanced degree (Master’s or PhD) in Computer Science, Computer Engineering,

Cybersecurity, or a related technical field.

* 20 years of software engineering experience, with experience with industry

leadership in cloud platform security, hypervisor security, hardware/CPU

security, or operating system defense.

* Experience anticipating and defending against emerging adversarial

capabilities, including AI/LLM-accelerated vulnerability discovery, automated

exploit synthesis, and autonomous agentic threat vectors.

* Experience in cross-organizational technical leadership, executive

communication, and building consensus across large, multi-disciplinary

engineering organizations (Hardware/Silicon).

* Expertise in hardware-software security co-design, including CPU

microarchitectural vulnerability mitigation (speculative execution,

side-channel analysis), hardware root-of-trust, vTPM, and Confidential

Computing.

ABOUT THE JOB:

As Principal Engineer for GCE Platform Security, you will serve as the premier

technical authority, executive architect, and overall owner for the end-to-end

security posture of Google Compute Engine (GCE) - protecting the foundational

global infrastructure that powers Google Cloud, Core Google services, and

advanced AI research labs and mission-critical enterprise workloads.

In this high-impact strategic role, your leadership spans the complete

architectural continuum between the distributed Control Plane and the

foundational Data Plane. Across the control plane, you will architect robust,

scalable defenses for multi-tenant orchestration, resource lifecycle management,

zero-trust identity and access boundaries, supply-chain integrity, and

high-assurance compliance for regulated and public-sector cloud environments.

Across the node data plane, you will lead deep systems security architecture

across hypervisors, virtual machine monitors (VMMs), host operating systems,

kernel subsystems, and hardware-level isolation mechanisms.

Crucially, you will navigate a rapidly transforming threat landscape shaped by

the emergence of agentic threat vectors enabled through advanced LLMs, where

automated, AI-driven vulnerability discovery and exploit generation compress

attacker timelines to machine speed. You will lead proactive defense-in-depth

across the platform - mitigating hardware and microarchitectural CPU

vulnerabilities (e.g., speculative execution, transient execution side-channels,

and address space isolation), eliminating memory safety exploitation risks

across the virtualization stack, and advancing host deprivileging and zero-trust

host architectures.

Furthermore, you will advocate for next-generation virtualization security

designs - leveraging custom silicon for isolation, establishing multi-domain

security boundaries, and architecting secure runtime substrates for

next-generation AI workloads, high-density sandboxed execution environments, and

massive accelerator clusters.

Google Cloud accelerates every organization’s ability to digitally transform its

business and industry. We deliver enterprise-grade solutions that leverage

Google’s cutting-edge technology, and tools that help developers build more

sustainably. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google

Cloud as their trusted partner to enable growth and solve their most critical

business problems.

Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills,

experience, and relevant education or training.

US: $307000 - $427000 (USD) + 30% bonus target + equity + benefits

Learn more about benefits at Google

[https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/benefits/].

RESPONSIBILITIES:

* Serve as the overall technical authority and executive owner for GCE Platform

Security, defining and driving the multi-year security strategy across

distributed global control planes and low-level node data planes.

* Formulate architectural and operational defenses to counter the rapid

emergence of autonomous agentic threat vectors and LLM-assisted exploitation

tools, establishing automated vulnerability discovery, proactive mitigation

frameworks, and rapid incident response capabilities across the fleet.

* Architect robust, hardware-level defenses and isolation boundaries to

eliminate and mitigate hardware CPU vulnerabilities, speculative execution

side-channels, transient execution threats, and cross-tenant leakage

* Lead security defenses and privilege reduction across hypervisor

technologies, virtual machine monitors (VMMs), host kernels, and low-level

runtimes, implementing sandboxing and defense against virtualization escapes.

* Drive the architectural outlook for host security and isolation, advancing

host deprivileging, zero-trust host architectures, hardware-assisted

offloading of security and lifecycle functions.