Principal Software Engineer ( Backend )

About the role

The ADEM (Autonomous Digital Experience Management) group at Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the technical roadmap and architecture of the backend ecosystem. This role requires expertise in designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, integrating AI/ML at scale, and driving innovation in security and networking.

Responsibilities

• Define the long-term architectural vision for ADEM backend services, ensuring scalability to support hundreds of millions of global endpoints and multi-petabyte telemetry streams.
• Architectural Governance: Lead the "Design Review Board" for the ADEM org, ensuring adherence to Secure AI by Design, high-availability patterns, and cost-efficient GCP utilization.
• Drive the transition from traditional analytics to Agentic AI workflows, overseeing the backend orchestration required to power LLM-driven autonomous remediation.
• Partner with Product Management, Data Science, and DevOps to translate ambiguous business requirements into robust, high-performance technical specifications.
• Act as a force multiplier by mentoring Staff and Senior engineers, fostering a culture of rigorous testing, high code quality, and proactive technical debt management.
• Serve as the ultimate technical escalation point for complex, systemic production issues, leading post-mortems that drive permanent architectural improvements.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with a significant portion dedicated to designing and operating large-scale distributed systems in a cloud-native environment.
• Advanced AI-Augmented Development: Expertise in leveraging AI-powered development tools including Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, and GitHub Copilot to accelerate the SDLC and automate complex refactoring and testing workflows.
• Distributed Systems Mastery: Proven track record of architecting systems that handle billions of events per day with strict sub-second latency requirements using Rust, Go (Golang), Java, or Python.
• GCP Principal-Level Expertise: Deep authoritative knowledge of the GCP ecosystem (GKE, Spanner, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Dataflow) and the ability to optimize cloud spend through sophisticated architectural choices (FinOps).
• Data Plane Innovation: Experience building high-throughput, low-latency data pipelines using technologies like Kafka, Pulsar, or Flink.
• Security & Networking Visionary: Deep understanding of Zero Trust architecture, L4-L7 networking, and advanced encryption standards to ensure ADEM remains the most secure platform in the industry.
• Open Source & Community: History of contributing to open-source projects (e.g., Kubernetes, Prometheus, Istio) or speaking at industry conferences.
• Education: BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent high-level professional experience.

Team

The ADEM engineering team is the engine of innovation at Palo Alto Networks. As a Principal Engineer, you will be at the center of this mission, tackling "impossible" problems in scale, security, and AI. We look for leaders who are comfortable in deep ambiguity, possess an insatiable curiosity, and are driven to build technology that protects the digital way of life for the world's largest enterprises.

Pay

$147,000.00 - $237,500.00/yr

Benefits

Our commitment to diversity and inclusion is unwavering. We celebrate unique perspectives and strive to create an inclusive environment where everyone feels valued and empowered to contribute their best work. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for all qualified individuals with disabilities and are an equal opportunity employer. We do not sponsor immigration applications for this position.