Principal Engineer, GCE Platform Security

Google; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 307,000 - 427,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, vision, life, andDis能力

401(k) with company match

Paid time off 20 days/year

Sick time 40 hours/year (Seattle 69)

Maternity leave 28–30 weeks

Baby Bonding leave 18 weeks

13 paid holidays

Job summary

Google is seeking a Principal Engineer for the GCE Platform Security team to lead the security posture of Google Compute Engine, safeguarding the global infrastructure that powers Google Cloud and related AI workloads.

You will guide defensive architecture across control planes and node data planes, addressing emerging AI-driven threat vectors and hardware-level vulnerabilities, while collaborating with diverse engineering teams to raise the bar on cloud security.

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).
• Advanced degree (Master's or PhD) in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Cybersecurity, or a related technical field.
• 20 years of software engineering experience, with leadership in cloud platform security, hypervisor security, hardware/CPU security, or OS 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, hardware root-of-trust, vTPM, and Confidential Computing.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the overall technical authority for GCE Platform Security, defining and driving the multi-year security strategy across control planes and node data planes.
• Formulate defenses to counter autonomous agentic threat vectors and LLM-assisted exploitation tools, with automated vulnerability discovery and rapid incident response.
• Architect hardware-level defenses and isolation to mitigate CPU vulnerabilities and side-channel threats.
• Lead security defenses and privilege reduction across hypervisors, VMMs, and host kernels, implementing sandboxing and defense against virtualization escapes.
• Drive host security and isolation with zero-trust architectures and hardware-assisted security functions.

Skills

15+ years software development

Security architecture

Hypervisor security

OS security

Education

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

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

Tools

KVM

QEMU

Linux kernel

VMMs

Job description

Google is seeking a Principal Engineer for the GCE Platform Security team to lead the security posture of Google Compute Engine, safeguarding the global infrastructure that powers Google Cloud and related AI workloads.

You will guide defensive architecture across control planes and node data planes, addressing emerging AI-driven threat vectors and hardware-level vulnerabilities, while collaborating with diverse engineering teams to raise the bar on cloud security.