Distinguished Engineer Software (Cortex Platform)
Palo Alto Networks28 days ago
Base Salary
$249k - $341k/yr
Responsibilities
- Embed in high-profile projects, set technical direction, run rapid experiments, and deliver critical-path code.
- Coordinate cross-team dependencies, clear blockers, and drive timely delivery.
- Lead high-leverage technical initiatives, including AI-native workflows that improve engineering productivity.
- Design and build AI-driven systems and processes that transform software development, testing, and shipping.
- Identify, research, and execute strategic initiatives to improve engineering velocity.
- Advise leadership, conduct senior technical interviews, and raise engineering standards.
- Mentor engineers through hands-on collaboration and technical guidance.
Requirements
- Deep practical AI expertise, including a proven record of building AI systems and AI-driven engineering processes.
- Broad technical depth in architecture, distributed systems, cloud, and data.
- Deep expertise in OS internals, networking, concurrency, storage, database internals, low-level debugging, and performance profiling.
- Extensive experience interviewing senior engineers and understanding high-quality engineering standards.
- Extensive experience as a senior hands-on engineer and as the go-to technical expert for complex, high-stakes systems.
- Exceptional communication, interpersonal, ownership, execution, and influence skills.
- Preferred: strong cybersecurity background.
- Preferred: proven DevOps experience or equivalent hands-on infrastructure knowledge.
- Preferred: demonstrated hacker mindset and curiosity about how systems function and can be broken.
Benefits
- Most teams work from the office full time, with flexibility when needed; the listing is marked hybrid.
- Employee benefits are referenced in the posting, but specific benefits are not detailed.
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About Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks builds cybersecurity products for enterprises and governments, including next-generation firewalls, cloud security (Prisma Cloud/Prisma Access), and SOC tools (Cortex). It sells subscriptions and appliances with cloud-delivered threat intelligence, securing networks, endpoints, and applications across data centers and public clouds. Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, the company is publicly traded on the NYSE under the ticker PANW.