Sr. Principal Software Engineer (L7 Security)
About Us
At Palo Alto Networks®, we’re united by a shared mission—to protect our digital way of life. We thrive at the intersection of innovation and impact, solving real-world problems with cutting-edge technology and bold thinking. Here, everyone has a voice, and every idea counts. We weave AI into the fabric of everything we do and use it to augment the impact every individual can have.
We believe collaboration thrives in person. Most of our teams work from the office full time, with flexibility when it’s needed. This model supports real-time problem-solving, stronger relationships, and the kind of precision that drives great outcomes.
About the Role
The 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.
As a Principal Software Engineer, you will drive the technical leadership and end-to-end delivery of next-generation cloud security solutions. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to design, implement, and troubleshoot high-scale distributed systems, playing a pivotal role in shaping the future of our network security architecture. This role offers the opportunity to innovate at the intersection of cloud technology and cybersecurity, delivering impactful security-as-a-service offerings that protect our digital way of life.
Responsibilities
- Provide technical leadership for the end-to-end delivery of solutions, ensuring alignment with cross-functional product management and quality assurance teams.
- Design, implement, and troubleshoot robust next-generation cloud security solutions to address complex network security challenges.
- Drive the development of scalable cloud security architecture through hands-on coding and strategic architectural planning.
- Manage the full product development lifecycle, from definition and design through implementation, testing, and deployment.
- Collaborate proactively with Product Management, SRE, and Quality Engineering to deliver high-quality security-as-a-service offerings to market.
- Simplify complex technical issues to improve end-customer outcomes by working closely with customer support teams.
- Foster a culture of innovation, intellectual curiosity, and problem-solving within the engineering organization.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent field with 15+ years of relevant software engineering experience.
- Minimum of 5 years of hands-on programming experience in Go or Java, with additional proficiency in Python or C highly valued.
- Proven experience designing and developing high-performance, high-scale distributed software applications in a cloud environment.
- Strong technical proficiency with cloud technologies such as message queue (Kafka/PubSub/Redis), Data Storage (SQL/Bigtable/Redis/Mongo/BigQuery).
- Demonstrated expertise in backend development, including REST APIs, databases, and serverless computing for distributed cloud applications.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with container orchestration platforms, specifically Docker and Kubernetes.
- Comprehensive understanding of public cloud design considerations, including microservice architectures, global network infrastructure, and load balancing.
- Working knowledge of TCP/IP networking protocols and principles.
- Prior experience working with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Pay
The starting base salary for this position is expected to be in the range of $170,000.00 - $277,000.00 per year, depending on qualifications, experience, and work location. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus.
This role is eligible for Immigration Sponsorship.
Benefits
A description of our employee benefits may be found here.