Security at Google?

To preface this: The security and privacy org at goog is pretty massive at several thousand people, not counting dedicated security teams for high-value targets or any other misc teams under different orgs. That is to say, your experience in ISE vs EIP vs Offsec vs etc is going to be drastically different, so anything discussed here will not necessarily transfer over to other teams. Addressing your specific questions in the context of the ISE team: WLB WLB is generally reasonable, with much of the balance being left to the individual although management heavily encourages moderating your workload and not trying to be a hero. Plenty of opportunities to take on additional responsibilities if you're aiming for promo or ratings, but baseline is very lax. Work Whether you find the work interesting will depend heavily on what you are interested in. There is a lot of flexibility in what you choose to work on, although there is some base expectations of handling security review work in some capacity if you're on certain teams. Otherwise you have a lot of leeway in finding the areas you're interested in contributing to, and choosing how you actually go about it. It may be a bit more difficult if you prefer to have tasks handed to you neatly packaged, but otherwise provides good growth opportunities without railroading you too much into things you don't enjoy. Management Management is fine, mostly hands off if you can work independently which is nice but able to support in case you need assistance. With the number of different initiatives going on, there is sometimes a lack of clarity on high level goals but that is to be expected with any large organization. Happy to answer specific questions if you have any, although will try to keep things high-level.