Principal Engineer, Software - Central Cloud Platform

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks® everything starts and ends with our mission:

Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.
Our vision is a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. We are a company built on the foundation of challenging and disrupting the way things are done, and we’re looking for innovators who are as committed to shaping the future of cybersecurity as we are.

Who We Are

We take our mission of protecting the digital way of life seriously. We are relentless in protecting our customers and we believe that the unique ideas of every member of our team contributes to our collective success. Our values were crowdsourced by employees and are brought to life through each of us everyday - from disruptive innovation and collaboration, to execution. From showing up for each other with integrity to creating an environment where we all feel included.

As a member of our team, you will be shaping the future of cybersecurity. We work fast, value ongoing learning, and we respect each employee as a unique individual. Knowing we all have different needs, our development and personal wellbeing programs are designed to give you choice in how you are supported. This includes our FLEXBenefits wellbeing spending account with over 1,000 eligible items selected by employees, our mental and financial health resources, and our personalized learning opportunities - just to name a few!

At Palo Alto Networks, we believe in the power of collaboration and value in-person interactions. This is why our employees generally work full time from our office with flexibility offered where needed. This setup fosters casual conversations, problem-solving, and trusted relationships. Our goal is to create an environment where we all win with precision.

Your Career

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Principal Engineer to join our Central Cloud Platform team, a core group that builds and maintains the foundational services for our Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and Netsec organizations. We need strong platform engineers with solid experience building highly scalable, resilient, and efficient platforms that power our products.

As a Principal Engineer, you will be an innovator who can challenge the status quo, thrive in a fast-paced environment, and architect elegant solutions to complex platform-level problems. You will have a massive impact on thousands of engineers by shaping the technical direction of the team and mentoring other engineers to foster a culture of engineering excellence.

This role is located at our dynamic Santa Clara, California headquarters campus.

Your Impact

• You will be responsible for building the next generation of platforms that accelerate product development across the company. The core problems we are solving are foundational and will have a massive impact. If these challenges excite you, you are a great fit for our team.

• Simplify and Automate Onboarding: Design and implement streamlined platforms to radically simplify new customer and new region onboarding, reducing time-to-value and operational complexity.

• Build a Scalable Workflow Service: Own the creation and operation of a "Workflow as a Service" platform, providing reliable, scalable orchestration for various product teams by running technologies like multi-tenant Temporal at scale.

• Champion Cost Optimization: Develop a Central Cost Platform that provides a holistic inventory service, enabling product teams to "shift-left" on cost awareness, eliminate unnecessary infrastructure spending, and auto-remediate regressions.

• Deliver Agentic Compute as a Service: Create a robust agentic compute platform for running standalone agents, providing a secure and vetted environment with managed control plane servers for various agentic workloads.

Your Experience 

• We are looking for someone who cares deeply about the technical development of other engineers and can effectively balance the needs of the business, our users, and the growth of our engineers.

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related field, or equivalent military experience.

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong background in building large-scale, distributed systems.

• Proven track record of building SaaS applications and being part of several SaaS release cycles.

• Strong proficiency in at least one of the following languages: Go, Python, or Java, with a proven ability to pick up a new language with ease.

• Deep experience with cloud-native technologies including containerization (Docker) and microservices architecture.

• Decent understanding of core distributed systems principles. You should have an ability to continuously map problems to first principles. 

• Familiarity with modern SaaS release models, including feature flags.

• Extensive hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform (GCP or AWS) is strongly recommended.

• Demonstrated experience mentoring at least two engineers in their career, providing technical guidance, and helping them achieve promotion.

• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to troubleshoot complex issues in a distributed environment.

• Strong communication skills and the ability to work collaboratively across teams.

Nice to Have

• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes. Since we are a platform team and use it extensively, deep K8s knowledge will help you stand out.

• Familiarity with agentic infrastructure and a basic curiosity on how to build and manage intelligent agents.

• Experience building applications with temporal.

The Team

Our engineering team is at the core of our products – connected directly to the mission of preventing cyberattacks. We are constantly innovating – challenging the way we, and the industry, think about cybersecurity. Our engineers don’t shy away from building products to solve problems no one has pursued before. We define the industry, instead of waiting for directions. We need individuals who feel comfortable in ambiguity, excited by the prospect of a challenge, and empowered by the unknown risks facing our everyday lives that are only enabled by a secure digital environment.

Compensation Disclosure

The compensation offered for this position will depend on qualifications, experience, and work location. For candidates who receive an offer at the posted level, the starting base salary (for non-sales roles) or base salary + commission target (for sales/commissioned roles) is expected to be between $173,000/YR - $237,500/YR. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. The description of our employee benefits may be found here.

Our Commitment

We’re problem solvers that take risks and challenge cybersecurity’s status quo. It’s simple: we can’t accomplish our mission without diverse teams innovating, together.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for all qualified individuals with a disability. If you require assistance or accommodation due to a disability or special need, please contact us at  [email protected].

Palo Alto Networks is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity in our workplace, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or other legally protected characteristics.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Is role eligible for Immigration Sponsorship?: Yes