Principal Software Engineer, Prisma Access

About the role

The Team Engineering - Our engineering team is at the core of our products and 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.

Responsibilities

• Analyze requirements, design, develop, and support highly scalable software features and infrastructure on our next-generation security platform — taking features from inception to production, ready for cloud-native deployment
• Architect and build distributed microservices that process traffic and configuration at scale for thousands of enterprise customers
• Write clean, testable, readable, and maintainable code that performs reliably under production load
• Build and automate monitoring, observability, and alerting infrastructure to ensure platform reliability and rapid incident response
• Participate in on-call rotations for production services and contribute to a culture of operational excellence
• Design and ship LLM-powered and agentic product features — including policy authoring assistants, intelligent troubleshooting agents, automated RCA, anomaly detection, and natural-language admin experiences
• Build production-grade RAG pipelines, tool-using agents, and multi-agent workflows over security telemetry, configuration data, and threat intelligence
• Implement guardrails, grounding, and human-in-the-loop controls to minimize hallucinations and ensure trustworthy behavior in security-critical contexts
• Apply ML/AI techniques to networking and orchestration problems: traffic classification, capacity prediction, smart routing, drift detection, and zero-day anomaly identification

Requirements

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field — or equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building production-grade backend systems
• Proficiency in one or more of: Go, Python, Java, or C++
• Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, operating systems, networking, and distributed systems
• Hands-on experience architecting services on at least one major public cloud — AWS, GCP, Azure, or OCI
• Working knowledge of networking protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP/HTTPS, TLS) and cloud network architectures (VPCs, load balancers, firewalls, NAT, peering)
• Proven experience developing and scaling complex distributed systems, including large-scale distributed databases (e.g., Cassandra, DynamoDB, Spanner, CockroachDB) and messaging/streaming systems (e.g., Kafka, Pub/Sub, SQS, NATS)
• Hands-on experience integrating LLMs into production services — API-based (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) or self-hosted — including prompt engineering, structured outputs, function/tool calling, and basic eval design
• Fluency with AI-assisted development workflows — daily use of tools like Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar; able to apply them effectively without over-trusting them
• Strong written and verbal communication — able to author technical proposals, design specs, and architecture diagrams, and present them to both technical and non-technical audiences

Qualifications

• Production experience with agentic AI frameworks — LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, or equivalents
• Familiarity with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and patterns for exposing internal systems as tools to LLMs and agents
• Experience building evaluation pipelines for LLM systems — offline evals, A/B testing, golden datasets, regression suites, LLM-as-judge patterns

Benefits

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 the annual range listed below. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found here.

Pay

$147,000.00 - $237,500.00/yr

Schedule

This is a full-time position with flexible working arrangements as per company policy.

Skills

Required skills include:

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field — or equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building production-grade backend systems
• Proficiency in one or more of: Go, Python, Java, or C++
• Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, operating systems, networking, and distributed systems
• Hands-on experience architecting services on at least one major public cloud — AWS, GCP, Azure, or OCI
• Working knowledge of networking protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP/HTTPS, TLS) and cloud network architectures (VPCs, load balancers, firewalls, NAT, peering)
• Proven experience developing and scaling complex distributed systems, including large-scale distributed databases (e.g., Cassandra, DynamoDB, Spanner, CockroachDB) and messaging/streaming systems (e.g., Kafka, Pub/Sub, SQS, NATS)
• Hands-on experience integrating LLMs into production services — API-based (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) or self-hosted — including prompt engineering, structured outputs, function/tool calling, and basic eval design
• Fluency with AI-assisted development workflows — daily use of tools like Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar; able to apply them effectively without over-trusting them
• Strong written and verbal communication — able to author technical proposals, design specs, and architecture diagrams, and present them to both technical and non-technical audiences

Benefits

Our commitment to diversity and inclusion is unwavering. We celebrate the unique contributions of our employees and strive to create an inclusive environment where everyone feels valued and respected. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for all qualified individuals with disabilities. If you require assistance or accommodation due to a disability or special need, please contact us at accommodations@paloaltonetworks.com.

Equal Opportunity Employer

We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome applications from all qualified individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other protected characteristic. All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Role Eligible for Immigration Sponsorship

Yes