Staff Software Engineer at Palo Alto Networks

About the role

You will join a Research and Development (R&D) team that will give you the opportunity to make a global impact by preventing successful cyber attacks. This team is looking for engineers who are passionate about technology, have an interest in cybersecurity, and want to make a positive difference. In this role, you will gain hands-on experience working on products ranging from our Strata, Prisma, and Cortex organizations.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design, develop, and deploy software solutions with agility and rapid iteration.
• Use and experiment with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, internal agents) to boost productivity and improve code quality.
• Help define and evolve new engineering practices that leverage AI for code generation, testing, documentation, and refactoring.
• Write clean, maintainable code and actively participate in peer reviews and team design discussions to ensure alignment.
• Contribute to the automation of development, deployment, and monitoring processes as part of a DevOps culture.
• Continuously learn and apply new AI technologies, frameworks, and techniques that can enhance developer workflows.
• Participate in team retrospectives and help drive improvements in team velocity and product quality.

Requirements

• BS/MS/PhD degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Machine Learning, Cybersecurity, or a similar technical field, with 3-5+ years of professional/equivalent software engineering experience.
• Strong programming skills in one or more modern programming languages (e.g., Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, Go, C/C++).
• Solid understanding of computer science fundamentals, including distributed systems, data structures, algorithms, and operating systems.
• Solid understanding of software development lifecycles (e.g., agile, DevOps) and version control tools like Git.
• Demonstrated problem-solving skills and a willingness to ask questions and work openly with others.

Preferred Qualifications

• Exposure to large language models (LLMs) or AI/ML APIs, even through personal projects.
• Familiarity with cloud environments (e.g., GCP, AWS, Azure) and containerized development (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with modern developer tools such as CI/CD pipelines, observability platforms, and infrastructure-as-code.
• A keen interest in Cybersecurity and protecting the digital world.