Principal Software Escalation Engineer
Palo Alto Networks · Columbia, SC · 4 days ago
On-siteEngineering$147k–$238k/yrFull-time
About the role
This role can be filled anywhere in the United States*. We're looking for a Principal Escalation Engineer to serve as a key architect of customer stability and product maturity within the Jupiter Group. This is a high-impact, cross-functional leadership role that sits at the intersection of R&D, Product, and Customer Success.
Responsibilities
- Voice of the Customer in Design (Shift Left): Join discovery and design sessions to validate proposed features against real-world customer use cases. Provide critical feedback on design and UX before development begins, flagging if a feature will be difficult to implement, fails to address specific edge cases, or introduces friction that hinders adoption.
- Define Holistic Product & Supportability Requirements: Go beyond standard logging; define the capabilities needed to streamline the entire customer journey. Specify requirements for smoother product onboarding, self-service troubleshooting tools, and connectivity checks (e.g., demanding a prerequisite script for connector installation or built-in latency monitoring between components).
- Own the R&D Escalation Strategy: Act as the single accountable authority for technical escalations, replacing reactive "ping-pong" with a structured, predictive pipeline that restores delivery predictability to the sprint teams.
- Drive Operational Excellence: Transform how we monitor and maintain health by owning the logic behind PagerDuty alerts, reducing noise, and defining the "Definition of Ready" for operational handoffs.
- Empower the Support Organization: Act as a force multiplier by leading high-level training and knowledge transfer, enabling Support to resolve complex issues independently and lowering the escalation rate.
- Lead Incident Lifecycle & CAPA: Drive the post-incident process, ensuring that every failure results in a systemic improvement, whether it's a code fix, a documentation update, or a process change.
- Influence the Roadmap: Use data from the field (trends, escaped bugs, and friction points) to drive strategic roadmap decisions, ensuring we prioritize technical debt and usability improvements alongside new features.
Qualifications
- 8+ years of experience in the software industry (Technical Support, R&D, or Sustaining Engineering).
- A "Product-Engineering" Mindset: Can look at a technical design and immediately foresee how a customer will struggle with it. Cares deeply about the user experience, not just the code execution.
- 5+ years of hands-on experience troubleshooting complex SaaS/Cloud environments (AWS preferred).
- Strong technical depth (scripting in Python/Bash/Go, reading code, SQL) to investigate issues independently and build tooling.
- Exceptional communication and leadership skills: Can challenge a Product Manager on a use case or guide a developer on a logging standard with equal confidence.
- Proven ability to drive cross-team initiatives and influence stakeholders without direct authority.
- Highly self-motivated with a strong sense of ownership and accountability.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in the Cyber Security domain.
- Background in Customer Success Engineering or Solutions Engineering.
- Experience defining architectural standards for observability and deployability.
- Experience defining "Definition of Ready" processes for escalation handling.
Benefits
Your vision will directly impact the quality, usability, and success of CyberArk’s next-generation cloud platform.
Pay
$147,000.00 - $237,500.00/yr
Schedule
N/A