Principal Engineer, Memory Safety and Agentic Modernization

Google; United States; Hybrid; USD 307,000 - 427,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) with company match

PTO 20 days/year

Job summary

Google is seeking a Principal Engineer for Memory Safety and Agentic Modernization to lead the migration of the virtualization stack from C/C++ to secure-by-design Rust. You will shape the technical roadmap, drive agentic coding workflows, and collaborate with AI teams to automate refactoring and verification across a massive compute fleet.

You will champion formal verification tools (Lean, TLA+) and build scalable solutions for enterprise workloads while ensuring security and performance.

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 for C/C++ to Rust migration and automated refactoring.
• Drive the systems security roadmap for memory-safe transformation of data plane and control plane services.
• Integrate formal methods (Lean, TLA+) to prove program correctness and verify unsafe Rust code.
• Serve as the PoC and technical leader for Rust and agentic coding across Google, mentoring engineers.

Skills

Rust

C

C++

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Advanced degree in CS or related field

Tools

KVM

QEMU

Lean

TLA+

Verus

Job description

Principal Engineer, Memory Safety and Agentic Modernization

In accordance with Washington state law, we are highlighting our comprehensive benefits package, which is available to all eligible US based employees. Benefits for this role include:

• Health, dental, vision, life, disability insurance
• Retirement Benefits: 401(k) with company match
• Paid Time Off: 20 days of vacation per year, accruing at a rate of 6.15 hours per pay period for the first five years of employment
• Sick Time: 40 hours/year (increased to 69 hours/year for Seattle) including 5 discretionary sick days per instance
• Maternity Leave (Short-Term Disability + Baby Bonding): 28-30 weeks
• Baby Bonding Leave: 18 weeks
• Holidays: 13 paid days per year

Note: By applying to this position you will have an opportunity to share your preferred working location from the following: Seattle, WA, USA; Sunnyvale, CA, USA.

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

Preferred qualifications:

• Advanced degree (e.g., Master’s or PhD) in Computer Science or a related field
• 20 years of software experience driving large-scale memory-safe language migrations
• Experience with formal verification systems and proof assistants (e.g., Lean, TLA+, or Verus)
• Experience with AI-assisted development, automated refactoring, and leading technical teams
• Deep specialization in hypervisor internals (e.g, KVM, QEMU), VMMs, and hardware virtualization/security

About the job

As a Principal Engineer for Memory Safety and Agentic Modernization, you will serve as the premier technical authority and single point of contact (PoC) for Google Cloud’s virtualization memory safety strategy and AI-driven agentic coding practices. You will lead the architectural strategy to transition the foundational virtualization stack and core data plane and management daemons from C/C++ to secure-by-design Rust, focusing on enhancing the security and resilience of the virtualization stack generally.

In this role, you will be responsible for orchestrating these migrations across a massive compute fleet, mitigating high-stakes guest-to-host escapes and insider threat vectors, and ensuring near bare-metal performance and absolute reliability for mission-critical enterprise workloads. Crucially, you will drive agentic coding workflows—partnering with infrastructure AI teams to design, evaluate, and scale agentic code transformation, including C++-to-Rust code translation, automated code generation and refactoring, and AI-assisted behavioral test synthesis. You will also lead the incorporation of advanced formal verification tools (e.g., Lean, TLA+, Verus) to prove program correctness.

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.

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.

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