Distinguished Engineer Software (Cortex Platform)
Palo Alto Networks3 days ago
Base Salary
$249k - $341k/yr
Responsibilities
- Drive the long-term technical vision and architecture for critical Cortex platforms and services.
- Design scalable, secure, and cost-efficient distributed systems for massive data volumes.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership and consultation across engineering teams.
- Lead cross-team architecture decisions balancing scalability, performance, operational complexity, and engineering velocity.
- Architect and optimize cloud-native infrastructure, data pipelines, distributed storage, and real-time analytics platforms.
- Own and resolve complex technical challenges spanning multiple services, teams, and cybersecurity products.
- Drive adoption of AI-native architectures, agentic AI, and intelligent automation across engineering workflows.
- Identify opportunities to apply AI to accelerate development, testing, troubleshooting, and operational efficiency.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related technical field.
- At least 14 years of professional software engineering experience focused on distributed, cloud-native application development.
- Expert-level Python and Go programming skills with experience building large-scale distributed systems.
- Strong knowledge of concurrency, networking, operating systems, databases, and storage systems.
- Extensive experience with cloud development, REST APIs, databases, serverless computing, and microservices architectures.
- Experience serving as a hands-on technical lead or architect on complex software projects.
- Experience architecting or implementing AI/ML-powered systems and familiarity with modern LLM-based technologies.
- Exceptional technical judgment, communication, collaboration, and ability to influence senior technical and business leaders.
- Preferred: at least 8 years of hands-on experience with Elasticsearch, Google Pub/Sub, or similar cloud technologies.
- Preferred: understanding of public cloud design, security, global network infrastructure, and load balancing.
- Preferred: experience with security operations, threat detection, cloud security posture management, and cybersecurity fundamentals.
- Preferred: experience working with cross-functional teams to deliver full-stack products at scale.
Benefits
- The role is primarily based in the office, with flexibility when needed and a hybrid designation.
- The posted annual base salary range is $248,700.00 to $341,250.00.
- Employee benefits information is available through the employer’s benefits program.
- Palo Alto Networks provides reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities or special needs.
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.