Principal Software Escalation Engineer

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.

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.
• Define Holistic Product & Supportability Requirements: Go beyond standard logging; define the capabilities needed to streamline the entire customer journey, including requirements for smoother product onboarding, self-service troubleshooting tools, and connectivity checks.
• 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

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. $147,000.00 - $237,500.00/yr

Pay

$147,000.00 - $237,500.00/yr

Schedule

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Skills

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Benefits

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Job Title

Principal Escalation Engineer

Company

Palo Alto Networks