Principal Engineer, Compute Platform Security

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;
Kirkland, WA, USA;
New York, NY, USA;
Sunnyvale, CA, USA

• 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 experience with industry leadership in cloud platform security, hypervisor security, hardware/CPU security, or operating system 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 (speculative execution, side-channel analysis), hardware root-of-trust, vTPM, and Confidential Computing.

As Principal Engineer for GCE Platform Security, you will serve as the premier technical authority, executive architect, and overall owner for the end-to-end security posture of Google Compute Engine (GCE) - protecting the foundational global infrastructure that powers Google Cloud, Core Google services, and advanced AI research labs and mission-critical enterprise workloads.

In this high-impact strategic role, your leadership spans the complete architectural continuum between the distributed Control Plane and the foundational Data Plane. Across the control plane, you will architect robust, scalable defenses for multi-tenant orchestration, resource lifecycle management, zero-trust identity and access boundaries, supply-chain integrity, and high-assurance compliance for regulated and public-sector cloud environments. Across the node data plane, you will lead deep systems security architecture across hypervisors, virtual machine monitors (VMMs), host operating systems, kernel subsystems, and hardware-level isolation mechanisms.

Crucially, you will navigate a rapidly transforming threat landscape shaped by the emergence of agentic threat vectors enabled through advanced LLMs, where automated, AI-driven vulnerability discovery and exploit generation compress attacker timelines to machine speed. You will lead proactive defense-in-depth across the platform - mitigating hardware and microarchitectural CPU vulnerabilities (e.g., speculative execution, transient…