"Security Princess" is on her business card, a title she came up with at a conference in Tokyo.
"I knew I'd have to hand out my card and I thought Information Security Engineer sounded so boring," she says. "Guys in the industry take it so seriously, so 'security princess' felt suitably whimsical."
Earlier this year, Google revealed just 30 in every 100 staff members were female.
"Fifty years ago there were similar percentages of women in medicine and law. Now, thankfully, that's shifted," Tabriz says.
"Technology is one of the fastest-growing fields, but in that respect it has a lot of catching up to do."
While she maintains she has never encountered overt sexism at Google she does say a male fellow college student told her she only got the job "cos you're a girl".
"He said it to my face, but I'm sure a lot of others were thinking it. The jerks are the ones that tend to be the most insecure."
Tabriz thinks the tech industry lacks female representation because women do themselves down.
"There was a study done a few years ago which questioned people who had dropped out of their computer science course," she says. "Women who left tended to have a B-minus average and the most common reason they gave was that they were finding it too hard, whereas among the men the most common grade was a low C but the reason they gave was that it wasn't interesting."
Sheryl Sandberg, the former vice-president at Google who is now chief operating officer at Facebook, supports the view.
"Women systematically underestimate their own abilities. You ask men and women to guess their GPAs [grade point average] - men always get it slightly high and women get it slightly low," she told a TED [technology, entertainment, design conference] talk a few years ago. "It means they don't know their worth."
Tabriz grew up in the suburbs of Chicago with her Iranian-immigrant father, a doctor, and Polish-American nurse mother, both of whom were computer illiterate.
As the older sister of two brothers, she was used to bossing boys around from an early age. "They'd say I was a bully, but I played them at their own game, in sports on the field, and at video games," she says."I was older and used to beat them up all the time."
But when her brothers grew up and she was not able to anymore, she felt she had to beat them some other way.
"I didn't know what I wanted to do at first. I remember taking a careers test in high school to see which job would suit me, I got 'police officer'.
"I laughed at the time but I realise now it wasn't that far off, after all, I'm in the business of protecting people."
Tabriz studied computer engineering at the University of Illinois.
Today, many are turning their hand to hacking, from the common criminal looking for ways to get hold of bank account details to the anti-establishment hacktivism networks such as Anonymous, to those with grander aims, such as bringing down Iran's entire gmail system.
Tabriz conducts in-house training of Google engineers wanting to get into security.
In her seminars she starts by asking students to think of a way to hack a vending machine for chocolate - but without the use of technology.
She knows from their answers who has the curiosity and the mischievousness needed to succeed. One of the smartest solutions was to insert a 10 Thai baht piece instead of a 2 coin, as both are the same size, weight and alloy. At 25 cents, the baht is worth a fraction of the euro coin.
Tabriz says "employees here are, on the whole, good at outside-the-box thinking".
For many black-hat hackers, Google is the ultimate target, and it has had to work to keep its enemies close.
Google offers outside hackers up to US$30,000 ($38,600) if they are able to find bugs or faults on Chrome. To date, hackers have been paid US$1.25 million, fixing more than 700 bugs.
Parisa Tabriz
Age?
31
Who?
Google security executive and white-hat hacker
Known for?
Tabriz heads a team of 30 experts in the United States and Europe. In 2012, she was named one of the top 30 under-30s to watch by Forbes magazine. She mentors under-16s at a yearly computer science conference in Las Vegas.
