Principal Engineer, Memory-Safe Virtualization & Rust

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Life insurance

Disability insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid time off 20 days/year

Sick time 40 hours/year (Seattle 69)

Job summary

Google Cloud seeks a Principal Engineer for Memory Safety and Agentic Modernization to lead the switch from C/C++ to secure-by-design Rust across virtualization components. You’ll guide architectural strategy, coordinate AI-assisted migrations, and drive formal verification adoption to guarantee correctness while preserving near bare-metal performance for enterprise workloads.

You will collaborate with AI and infrastructure teams to scale automated refactoring, generate tests, and translate C++

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 and developing low-level systems software (e.g., operating systems, kernels, hypervisors, runtime environments, or compilers).
• Experience with Rust, C, and C++.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architectural strategy and technical execution for migrating the virtualization stack.
• Partner with internal AI engineering teams to design and deploy agentic coding tools and methodologies to automate C/C++ to Rust migration, generate behavioral tests, and execute large-scale automated refactoring.
• Drive the systems security roadmap, targeting critical data plane and control plane services for memory-safe transformation.
• Integrate formal methods, theorem-proving platforms (e.g., Lean, TLA+), and compile-time static guarantees to prove program correctness and ensure that unsafe Rust code is verified as safe.
• Serve as the dedicated single point of contact (PoC) and technical leader for Rust and agentic coding across the organization, mentoring and upskilling the engineering workforce to drive an engineering velocity multiplier.

Skills

Rust

C

C++

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/CE or equivalent

Tools

Lean

TLA+

Verus

Job description

Google Cloud seeks a Principal Engineer for Memory Safety and Agentic Modernization to lead the switch from C/C++ to secure-by-design Rust across virtualization components. You’ll guide architectural strategy, coordinate AI-assisted migrations, and drive formal verification adoption to guarantee correctness while preserving near bare-metal performance for enterprise workloads.

You will collaborate with AI and infrastructure teams to scale automated refactoring, generate tests, and translate C++