Principal Engineer, Safeguards
Sunnyvale, CA, USA · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 22, 2026
- Experience
- 15 years of professional experience in engineering leadership or related technical roles.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
About the job
Sets technical direction and builds safety and security defenses for Google Cloud AI products, with a primary focus on agentic systems.
What you'll do
- Design, prototype, and ship safeguards for AI-driven threats using classifiers, runtime policy enforcement, and ML systems.
- Own agentic-safeguards architecture and lead threat modeling, translating adversary risks into engineering requirements and defenses.
- Build reusable safety infrastructure and data analysis, detection, and response capabilities; work across teams to set standards and raise engineering quality.
What they ask for
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
- 15 years of professional experience in engineering leadership or related technical roles.
- Experience in AI and machine learning, including building and deploying classifiers and ML systems in production.
Nice to have
- Experience with threat modeling for complex, evolving, adversarial systems or securing agentic or autonomous AI systems.
- Experience with Vertex AI or Gemini Enterprise; depth in adversarial ML, red-teaming, abuse/fraud detection, or cross-team influence.
Pay
$307000 - $427000 USD base salary
Tools
Vertex AI, Gemini Enterprise, classifiers, runtime policy enforcement, ML systems
AI focus
Designs safeguards against CBRN, cyber, agentic, and fraud risks, including defenses for agentic tool use, planning, memory, and multi-agent interactions.
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