Director, Security Defense Platforms

Minimum qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Cyber security, or equivalent practical experience
• 15 years of software engineering and technical leadership experience, including 6 years of experience managing managers and leading multi-site engineering organizations
• Experience partnering with security operations, threat intelligence, or incident response teams to build developer and detection platforms
• Experience using modern AI/ML applications in cyber security including automated reasoning, LLM-based agent evaluation, anomaly detection, and synthetic threat injection/watermarking

Preferred qualifications:

• 20 years of experience in software engineering, distributed systems, or enterprise platform infrastructure, with experience in cyber security or threat defense domains
• Experience architecting Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR), SIEM, EDR data fabrics, or real-time event correlation engines
• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed streaming pipelines, query engines, and high-throughput data processing systems operating at enterprise/hyper-scale
• Experience with cross-functional leadership and executive presence to translate deep architectural challenges into clear business and security risk decisions for VP/SVP stakeholders
• Expertise in infrastructure cost optimization, data lifecycle/retention governance, and high-availability streaming SLO management

About the job

As the Director of Security Defense Platforms, you will lead the global software engineering organization responsible for the foundational software, streaming pipelines, telemetry architectures, and AI-driven automated containment infrastructure that powers all of Alphabet’s detection and response operations.

In this role, you will be an executive engineering leader with experience building massive-scale distributed data systems, driving high-reliability platform engineering, and advocating advanced security automation and agentic defense.

You will bridge software engineering with cyber defense partnering closely with Detection and Response domain leads, and enterprise platform teams to transform Google’s security posture from reactive "Detect and Respond" to proactive "Infer and Interrupt".

Additionally, you will manage, grow, and mentor a globally distributed organization of Software Engineering Managers, Tech Leads, and Software Engineers across multiple global sites. You will own the long-term architectural road map for the Detection and Response teams core infrastructure.

You will lead the engineering and deployment of automated threat containment (e.g., automated mitigation pipelines, and dynamic endpoint mitigation) to disrupt high-risk access abuse, workspace DLP, and intrusion attempts in real-time. You will drive the integration of AI models and agentic reasoning into operational workflows, automating alert triage, incident summaries, and investigative workflows.

You will ensure platform reliability, multi-region resilience, and SLO compliance, reducing operational toil and on-call burden to established target of engineering bandwidth.

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: $307000 - $427000 (USD) + 30% bonus target + equity + benefits

Learn more about benefits at Google .

Responsibilities

• Foster a high-performance engineering culture emphasizing technical aptitude, operational excellence, and continuous architectural innovation.
• Deliver large-scale resource optimization initiatives, drastically reducing global data storage and compute footprints while maintaining strict end-to-end detection latencies.
• Institutionalize configuration-based detection frameworks that cut authoring and productionization cycles down to industry-leading velocity.
• Advocate for novel defense mechanisms for autonomous third-party agent security, data leakage mitigation, and federated access auditing.
• Deliver against executive and board-level cyber security risk reduction commitments.