Sr Staff IT AI Software Engineer

About the role

The Customer Support Tools team in IT at Palo Alto Networks is a critical part of our business, enabling our employees and business to be successful. Our focus is on the next-generation of IT—cloud, mobile, and social. We are a team of disruptors, challengers of the status quo, and drivers of change.

Responsibilities

• Drive the strategic architectural vision and deployment of high-quality, scalable software assets using Python and React, ensuring long-term alignment with enterprise architecture.
• Architect and govern advanced agentic systems using the Vertex AI Agent SDK (or alternative frameworks like LangChain / LangGraph) and A2A protocols to enable seamless interoperability between autonomous enterprise services.
• Establish enterprise-wide AI Evaluation (Evals) frameworks and automated benchmarking pipelines to rigorously measure, monitor, and optimize LLM/agent performance across metrics like accuracy, safety, latency, and cost.
• Define the organizational strategy and architecture for data retrieval pipelines, ensuring scalable and optimized utilization of vector embeddings, semantic search, and similarity-based retrieval patterns.
• Standardize and scale Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to effectively bridge core enterprise IT data with LLM-driven applications across business units.
• Partner closely with technical executives, product management, and cross-functional engineering teams to align AI initiatives with overarching business objectives and drive high-impact results.
• Mentor and cultivate technical leaders and engineers across the organization, fostering a culture of excellence, applied learning, and accountability in full-stack and AI domains.
• Take ultimate accountability for cross-team project outcomes, ensuring AI and software solutions meet rigorous enterprise-grade standards for security, quality, and performance.

Qualifications

• Minimum of 9 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent military experience.
• 9+ years of professional experience in backend development with Python, utilizing frameworks like Django or FastAPI to design and build fault-tolerant microservice architectures.
• Proven track record of architecting, deploying, and scaling production-grade Generative AI and LLM-powered applications.
• Hands-on experience with LLM orchestration and agentic frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph, or native cloud Agent SDKs).
• Deep technical expertise in RAG architectures, including vector embeddings, semantic search, and working with vector databases.
• Demonstrated experience implementing LLM guardrails, prompt injection defenses, and robust AI evaluation (Evals) workflows.
• Expert-level proficiency in containerization and orchestration using Docker and Kubernetes (GKE).
• Proven track record of architecting and delivering enterprise-grade software solutions from concept to production at scale.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep, hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform, particularly Google Vertex AI.
• Production-level knowledge of Agent SDK, LangChain, or LangGraph frameworks, as well as A2A protocols and the implementation of MCP servers.
• Experience integrating and scaling Agentic IDEs (e.g., Cursor, Windsurf) within professional development workflows.
• Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science or a related field.

Pay

$145,000.00 - $235,500.00/yr

Schedule

Full-time, with flexibility when needed.

Benefits

Details of our employee benefits may be found here.

Is role eligible for Immigration Sponsorship?

Yes