Security Engineer II, Hybrid Cloud Guidelines

There's no such thing as a "safe system" - only safer systems. Our Security team works to create and maintain the safest operating environment for Google's users and developers. As a Security Engineer, you help protect network boundaries, keep computer systems and network devices hardened against attacks and provide security services to protect highly sensitive data like passwords and customer information. Security Engineers work directly with network equipment and actively monitor our systems for attacks and intrusions. You also work with software engineers to proactively identify and fix security flaws and vulnerabilities.

You use your industry experience to own and drive the resolution of complex security incidents, policy questions and technical security issues.

The Hybrid Cloud Environments (HCE) organization is on a mission to accelerate internal development by making Google “Customer Zero” for Google Cloud platform (GCP). Core to this mission is ensuring that every Google workload, from experimental prototypes to production-grade autonomous agents, operates in governed, safe-by-default environments that meet enterprise security and compliance baselines without developer friction or manual approvals. Crucially, this architecture is operator-agnostic: we provide identical, safe-by-default guardrails whether infrastructure is operated by a human engineer or an autonomous AI agent.

Our Security Engineers embed into critical efforts across the HCE organization and adjacent organizations as force multipliers. These are typically direct engagements, working directly with engineers from ideas through implementation. In this role, you will contribute to design, implement features and fixes that address gaps, go deep on requirements to understand the domain, and collaborate across product, security, and implementation requirements to accelerate our customer

The Core team builds the technical foundation behind Google’s flagship products. We are owners and advocates for the underlying design elements, developer platforms, product components, and infrastructure at Google. These are the essential building blocks for excellent, safe, and coherent experiences for our users and drive the pace of innovation for every developer. We look across Google’s products to build central solutions, break down technical barriers and strengthen existing systems. As the Core team, we have a mandate and a unique opportunity to impact important technical decisions across the company.

Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

US: $123000 - $174000 (USD) + 15% bonus target + equity + benefits

Learn more about benefits at Google.

Responsibilities

• Complete scoped engineering tasks and make iterative improvements to both product code and security tools within larger projects. Manage standard operational tasks efficiently and apply established engineering practices with minimal daily supervision.
• Make straightforward risk assessments using intermediate knowledge of familiar security domains, recognizing when to escalate complex or ambiguous issues to executive engineers. Contribute to remediation efforts by applying known risk patterns and following established team guidelines.
• Utilize agentic development tools and AI assistants to accelerate the completion of defined coding, testing, and analysis tasks. Operate within established project guardrails and execute automated verification loops configured by the team.
• Implement clearly scoped features, tests, and security hardening measures for platforms supporting autonomous agents or secure sandboxes. Contribute to the maintenance of agentic governance infrastructure in line with architectural guidance.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 1 year of coding experience in one or more general purpose languages.
• 1 year of experience with security assessments or security design reviews or threat modeling.
• Experience with security engineering, computer and network security and security protocols.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience with Terraform, policy compilers, and automated deployment pipelines across multi-organization cloud environments.
• Experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) governance primitives. (e.g., organization policies, IAM allow/deny policies, hierarchical firewalls, VPC service controls (VPC-SC), principal access boundaries, and resource manager/cloud tags).
• Experience developing with agents as well as designing environments or APIs for autonomous AI agents.

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; San Jose, CA, USA; New York, NY, USA.

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