Principal Engineer, Hybrid Cloud Environment

Google•Zurich, CA

3d•€232,000 - €237,000

About The Position

As Principal Engineer and Unified Tech Lead (UTL) for the Hybrid Cloud Environment (HCE) team, you will serve as the organization’s primary technical authority, owning the technical direction and multi-year roadmap for a platform that establishes an automated, secure cloud infrastructure plane across Google. The platform translates natural-language developer intent and declarative governance into secure, compliant, scalable cloud environments. Its single-call instantiation pattern aims to reduce the operational friction of provisioning cloud resources and make governed environment creation straightforward for human engineers and autonomous AI agents. The role bridges traditional developer ecosystems, such as Google3, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), while guiding an engineering organization and representing engineering standards across Google. The Core team develops foundational technologies, developer platforms, product components, and infrastructure for Google products. It builds central solutions, removes technical barriers, strengthens existing systems, and contributes to technical decisions across the company.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
15 years of experience in software engineering, focused on designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed cloud infrastructure, policy engines, or control planes.
Experience in a technical leadership role leading senior engineering teams and defining multi-year architectural strategies.

Nice To Haves

Experience with AI application platforms, prompt engineering systems, or orchestrating agentic workflows.
Deep familiarity with developer infrastructure and Cloud Platform solutions.
Exceptional executive communication and influence skills, with a proven ability to lead across organizational boundaries and align executive-level priorities.
Track record of designing compilers, policy engines, or domain-specific languages that compile high-level configurations or intents into secure cloud configurations.

Responsibilities

Own the technical direction and multi-year roadmap for the Hybrid Cloud Environment platform.
Define a compiler that translates natural-language intent and decorators, including residency and budget, into secure cloud environments; establish a reference implementation with a federated registry.
Enable autonomous AI agents to operate using strictly bounded, non-amplifiable credentials.
Lead control-plane design for zero-trust identity, using short-lived credentials integrated with Google’s identity plane and Sigstore attestations.
Build automated drift pipelines, reaper protocols, and CVE controllers to eliminate manual compliance tickets.
Mentor staff and senior staff engineers and foster an AI-fluent culture of rapid, safe iteration.
Represent engineering standards across Google.
Represent the organization across Core and Product Areas and arbitrate complex technical disputes.
Collaborate across organizational boundaries to establish a safe adoption ratchet and drive organic GCP adoption.