Senior Principal Software Engineer, Tools & Platforms (Cortex)
Palo Alto Networks8 days ago
Base Salary
$184k - $297k/yr
Responsibilities
- Define and drive the long-term technical vision and architecture for developer platforms, infrastructure, and engineering tooling across multiple organizations.
- Architect, implement, and operate resilient, secure, scalable, and highly available infrastructure and platform solutions.
- Write platform and infrastructure software while setting standards for maintainability, performance, security, and operational excellence.
- Lead the design and implementation of complex, business-critical systems and platform capabilities with organization-wide impact.
- Lead cross-functional technical initiatives, architecture reviews, and design discussions while aligning teams on technology strategy.
- Establish engineering standards, reusable frameworks, and reference architectures that improve software quality, developer productivity, and platform consistency.
- Provide expert code reviews and technical mentorship to Principal, Senior, and Staff Engineers.
- Drive modernization involving cloud-native technologies, Kubernetes, distributed systems, observability, automation, and platform engineering.
- Lead incident response and complex production troubleshooting and identify systemic reliability improvements.
- Improve software delivery practices through infrastructure automation, CI/CD, and developer experience initiatives.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 9+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, networking, storage, and compute platforms.
- 9+ years of experience with AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud and modern cloud-native architectures.
- 9+ years of experience developing, deploying, and operating microservices on Kubernetes using modern cloud-native technologies.
- 7+ years of hands-on programming experience in Python and/or Go.
- 7+ years of experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD automation, platform engineering, and developer productivity tooling.
- Expertise in system architecture, scalability, reliability, performance optimization, security, observability, operational excellence, software quality, testing, diagnostics, debugging, and production support.
- Preferred qualifications include leading enterprise-scale technical initiatives, influencing architecture across multiple organizations, driving engineering strategy without direct authority, and communicating effectively with executive leadership, architects, and engineering teams.
Benefits
- Most teams work from the office full time, with flexibility when needed; the role is also marked as hybrid.
- Employee benefits are described in the employer’s benefits materials.
- The posting states a commitment to reasonable accommodations and equal employment opportunity.
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.