Parisa Tabriz used to be a hacker. Now she is a princess.

Ms. Tabriz is a director of engineering at Google, where she oversees its Chrome web browser and a team of security investigators called Project Zero. Several years ago, when Google required her to get business cards, she picked the title “security princess” because it seemed less boring than “information security engineer,” her actual title at the time.

As Ms. Tabriz climbed the ranks, the designation stuck — and reminded men in the cybersecurity field that women belonged there, too. “I want them to know that princesses can do engineering and STEM,” Ms. Tabriz said.

Chrome is the world’s most widely used web browser — the window through which more than a billion people view the internet every day. Some days, Ms. Tabriz’s work at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., entails studying furniture design (rounded chairs and felt baskets, she said, helped inspire the curve of Chrome’s tabs); at other times, she studies wonky research papers. One recent challenge: trying to figure out how to keep search queries and other data private, even if multiple users are sharing a single phone for internet access, as is often the case in developing countries.

Often, Ms. Tabriz has to figure out how to convey complex concepts like encryption through pictograms so that users around the world can understand them. When a user visited a website over an encrypted connection, Chrome used to show a green lock icon to indicate “secure,” while a red lock indicated the connection might not be private. But some users mistook the locks for tiny purses.

On Twitter, Ms. Tabriz describes herself as Project Zero’s “den mom.” The group hunts down unknown vulnerabilities in products made by Google and its competitors and then publicly discloses its discoveries. The group’s work has unearthed widespread vulnerabilities like Meltdown and Spectre; most recently it discovered several security flaws in Apple’s mobile operating system.

"Noon. I see they’re serving Persian food for lunch, and I’m almost tempted to try it but stick to the salad bar. Persian food at work is always a disappointment compared with my mom’s cooking. She’s Polish-American, but she learned how to cook traditional Persian food from my grandma, who would visit from Iran. They didn’t share a common language outside of cooking, but after years of kitchen time, my mom makes an amazing ghormeh sabzi and kuku sabzi."