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

Location

Anywhere in the United States

Equal Opportunity Employer

We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome all qualified applicants regardless of background, experience, or beliefs.

Immigration Sponsorship

Yes