Principal Engineer, Data Protection

About the job

As a Principal Engineer for the Data Protection team, you will drive technical excellence for a broad set of Google critical systems and enable the data protection of Google products. This includes enabling secure AI development by introducing data protection controls that don’t impede velocity as well as agentic approaches to these challenges (e.g., data labeling, policy enforcement, data transformation). They will help design a multi-year engineering roadmap, balancing short- and long-term goals and investments, to ensure that Google is well-positioned to continue to protect users while the overall ecosystem continues to grow in complexity and be disrupted by AI. In this role, you will navigate a surge in high-priority mandates, including architecting cross-domain protection for data traversing Google products, device-to-cloud boundaries, systemic safeguards for agentic workflows, and automated technical compliance with accelerating AI regulations.

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.

Responsibilities

• Lead analysis of systems across data protection domains to identify opportunities for stronger integration and alignment, and lead development of roadmaps for well-lit paths across tech stacks in these domains.
• Work with cross-functional leaders of the data protection domains to get alignment on the roadmaps and enable execution against those, and drive agentic AI approaches to these problems to achieve coverage, speed, and scale.
• Work with partner teams to ensure the protection of data flowing through AI-powered data agent platforms.
• Directly help lead the execution against strategy for some critical projects and areas, partnering with the relevant engineering and cross-functional directors and technical leaders.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 15 years of experience in software engineering, with 8 years in a technical engineering role.
• Experience in data protection and privacy domains.
• Experience in AI and machine learning, with a focus on developing, protecting, and deploying AI-powered agent platforms.
• Experience with protecting systems.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or Computer Science.
• Experience motivating others to act by creating a shared sense of vision or purpose, creating a compelling vision for the future, communicating clearly, and employing a collaborative leadership approach.
• Experience leading complex cross-functional engineering projects and indirectly leading a distributed team of engineers across organizations and teams.
• Ability to provide clarity and alignment across the organization on goals, outcomes and timelines, and encourage engineering excellence, mentoring others to uphold it.