Principal Engineer, Cloud Compute Platform Security

Google; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 307,000 - 427,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid time off

Holidays

Job summary

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 to help developers build more sustainably.

As Principal Engineer for GCE Platform Security, you will serve as the premier technical authority, executive architect, and owner for the end-to-end security posture of Google Compute Engine, protecting the global infrastructure powering Google Cloud and AI research

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).

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 and rapid incident response capabilities.
• Architect robust hardware-level defenses and isolation boundaries to eliminate CPU vulnerabilities, speculative execution side-channels, and cross-tenant leakage.
• Lead security defenses and privilege reduction across hypervisor technologies, VMMs, host kernels, and low-level runtimes, implementing sandboxing and defense against virtualization escapes.
• Drive the architectural outlook for host security and isolation, advancing zero-trust host architectures and hardware-assisted security lifecycle functions.

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience

Advanced degree (Master's or PhD) in CS/CE/Cybersecurity

Tools

KVM

QEMU

Linux kernel

Hypervisor security

Job description

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 to help developers build more sustainably.

As Principal Engineer for GCE Platform Security, you will serve as the premier technical authority, executive architect, and owner for the end-to-end security posture of Google Compute Engine, protecting the global infrastructure powering Google Cloud and AI research