Jobs · Vermont

Principal Software Escalation Engineer

Palo Alto Networks · Montpelier, VT · 4 days ago
On-site$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

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