Principal Machine Learning Platform Engineer (Prisma AIRS)

Our Mission: At Palo Alto Networks®, we’re united by a shared mission—to protect our digital way of life. We thrive at the intersection of innovation and impact, solving real-world problems with cutting-edge technology and bold thinking. Here, everyone has a voice, and every idea counts. If you’re ready to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who are just as passionate as you are, you’re in the right place.

About the Role

In order to be the cybersecurity partner of choice, we must trailblaze the path and shape the future of our industry. This is something our employees work at each day and is defined by our values: Disruption, Collaboration, Execution, Integrity, and Inclusion. We weave AI into the fabric of everything we do and use it to augment the impact every individual can have.

We believe collaboration thrives in person. That’s why most of our teams work from the office full time, with flexibility when it’s needed. This model supports real-time problem-solving, stronger relationships, and the kind of precision that drives great outcomes.

Your Career With Prisma AIRS: Palo Alto Networks is building the world's most comprehensive AI security platform. Organizations are increasingly building complex ecosystems of AI models, applications, and agents, creating dynamic new attack surfaces with risks that traditional security approaches cannot address. In response, Prisma AIRS delivers model security, posture management, AI red teaming, and runtime protection. Our customers can confidently deploy AI-driven innovation while ensuring a formidable security posture from development through runtime.

Responsibilities

• Architect and Design: Lead the architectural design of a highly scalable, low-latency, and resilient ML inference platform capable of serving a diverse range of models for real-time security applications.
• Technical Leadership: Provide technical leadership and mentorship to the team, driving best practices in MLOps, software engineering, and system design.
• Strategic Optimization: Drive the strategy for model and system performance, guiding research and implementation of advanced optimization techniques like custom kernels, hardware acceleration, and novel serving frameworks.
• Set The Standard: Establish and enforce engineering standards for automated model deployment, robust monitoring, and operational excellence for all production ML systems.
• Cross-Functional Vision: Act as a key technical liaison to other principal engineers, architects, and product leaders to shape the future of the Prisma AIRS platform and ensure end-to-end system cohesion.
• Solve the Hardest Problems: Tackle the most ambiguous and challenging technical problems in large-scale inference, from mitigating novel security threats to achieving unprecedented performance goals.

Requirements

• BS/MS or Ph.D. in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Extensive professional experience in software engineering with a deep focus on MLOps, ML systems, or productionizing machine learning models at scale.
• Expert-level programming skills in Python are required; experience in a systems language like Go, Java, or C++ is a plus.
• Deep, hands-on experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems on a major cloud platform (GCP, AWS, Azure, or OCI).
• Proven track record of leading the architecture of complex ML systems and MLOps pipelines using technologies like Kubernetes and Docker.
• Mastery of ML frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch) and extensive experience with advanced inference optimization tools (ONNX, TensorRT).
• A strong understanding of popular model architectures (e.g., Transformers, CNNs, GNNs) is a significant plus.
• Demonstrated expertise with modern LLM inference engines (e.g., vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM) is required. Open-source contributions in these areas are a significant plus.
• Experience with low-level performance optimization, such as custom CUDA kernel development or using Triton Language, is a plus.
• Experience with data infrastructure technologies (e.g., Kafka, Spark, Flink) is a plus.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and automation tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI, Tekton) is a plus.

Pay

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 in the range of $157,200.00 - $254,100.00 per year. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus.

Benefits

A description of our employee benefits may be found here.

This role is eligible for Immigration Sponsorship.