Senior Staff Software Engineer — Layer 7 Security
Palo Alto Networks20 days ago
Base Salary
$135k - $218k/yr
Responsibilities
- Drive development of scalable, real-time, distributed cloud security systems.
- Define and implement high-performance, maintainable system architectures.
- Set technical direction for critical components with attention to scalability, reliability, and security.
- Partner with product management, security research, and platform teams to translate requirements into executable designs.
- Lead software development from concept through deployment and sustainment.
- Establish engineering practices for code quality, performance optimization, and secure development.
- Mentor engineers and raise the organization’s technical capabilities.
- Identify architectural, tooling, and process gaps and drive organizational improvements.
- Serve as a technical authority for debugging, performance tuning, and complex system challenges.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical or military experience.
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant senior technical leadership experience.
- Expert-level C proficiency and strong Go proficiency.
- Extensive Unix/Linux development experience.
- Experience designing and building large-scale, high-performance distributed systems.
- Deep knowledge of networking fundamentals, TCP/IP internals, and network security technologies.
- Advanced experience with multithreaded, multiprocess, and multicore system design.
- Strong data structures, algorithms, and systems-level performance optimization foundation.
- Ability to lead architecture and deliver complex cross-functional initiatives.
- Strong communication skills for influencing technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Preferred: experience with cloud platforms, orchestration systems, and containerized deployments.
- Preferred: expertise in TLS/SSL internals, cryptography, and OpenSSL.
- Preferred: HTTP protocol and backend service development experience.
- Preferred: Python proficiency for tooling, automation, or system integration.
Benefits
- Most teams work from the office full time, with flexibility when needed.
- The role may include restricted stock units and a bonus in addition to base compensation.
- Employee benefits are available through the company’s benefits program.
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.