Principal Cloud Platform Security Engineer

Google; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 307,000 - 427,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, vision, life insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid time off 20 days per year

Sick time 40 hours/year (69 Seattle)

Maternity leave 28-30 weeks

Baby Bonding Leave 18 weeks

13 paid holidays

Job summary

Google is seeking a Principal Engineer to own the end-to-end security posture of Google Compute Engine (GCE). You will lead defenses across the control plane and node data plane, aligning with zero-trust principles and multi-tenant isolation.

You will tackle emerging AI/LLM-accelerated threats, advance hardware-assisted security, and guide secure runtime substrates for AI workloads and large-scale clusters in a dynamic, high-impact environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in CS, CE, 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.

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 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.

Skills

Low-level systems software

Hypervisor security

Linux kernel internals

VMMs / virtualization

Security architecture

Threat modeling

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/CE

Advanced degree (MS/PhD)

Job description

Google is seeking a Principal Engineer to own the end-to-end security posture of Google Compute Engine (GCE). You will lead defenses across the control plane and node data plane, aligning with zero-trust principles and multi-tenant isolation.

You will tackle emerging AI/LLM-accelerated threats, advance hardware-assisted security, and guide secure runtime substrates for AI workloads and large-scale clusters in a dynamic, high-impact environment.