Principal Software Engineer - SASE AI/ML

Sr Principal Software Engineer

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. If you're ready to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who are just as passionate as you are, you're in the right place.

In order to be the cybersecurity partner of choice, we must trailblaze the path and shape the future of our industry. This is something our employees work at each day and is defined by our values: Disruption, Collaboration, Execution, Integrity, and Inclusion. We weave AI into the fabric of everything we do and use it to augment the impact every individual can have. If you are passionate about solving real-world problems and ideating beside the best and the brightest, we invite you to join us!

We believe collaboration thrives in person. That's why 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.

As a Sr Principal Software Engineer within the Engineering team, you will drive the technical leadership and end-to-end delivery of next-generation 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 offerings that protect our digital way of life.

Key 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.
• Design, develop and implement highly scalable software features and data ingestion on our next-generation security platform as part of our Strata Cloud Manager.
• Work with different development and quality assurances groups to achieve the best quality.
• Suggest and implement improvements to the development process.
• Work with DevOps and the Technical Support teams to troubleshoot customer issues.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• Education and Experience:

  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or an equivalent field.
  • 10 years of relevant software engineering experience.
  • Minimum of 5 years of hands-on programming experience in Python or Java, with additional proficiency in Go

• Technical Expertise (Distributed Systems and Cloud):

  • Proven experience designing and developing high-performance, high-scale distributed software applications in a cloud environment.
  • Strong technical proficiency with cloud technologies such as data ingest (Data Flow, Flink, Apache Beam), message queue (Kafka/PubSub/) and Data Storage (BigQuery/SQL/Bigtable/Redis/).
  • Demonstrated expertise in backend development, including REST APIs, databases, and serverless computing for distributed cloud applications.
  • Experience in developing services in the cloud/Kubernetes.
  • Experience with building data pipelines and analytics pipelines using tools like Dataflow, PubSub, or GKE.
  • Strong understanding of message queuing, stream processing, and highly scalable 'big data' data stores.
  • Deep understanding in Big Data technologies like Kafka, Data Flow, and SQL, including developing APIs.
  • AI first mindset with deep expertise using AI tools like Claude, Gemini etc.

• Development Practices:

  • Mastery of the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, peer review, and operations.
  • Experience with RESTful interfaces and Build Management tools (Gradle, Maven).
  • Experience in continuous integration and design.
  • Experience with Test-Driven Development (TDD).
  • Experience with distributed computing and object-oriented design and analysis.
  • Strong understanding of microservices-based deployments with the ability to design services.
  • Familiarity with Agile methodologies (e.g., Scrum Process).

• Other Requirements:

  • Familiarity working with GCP or other Cloud platforms such as AWS.
  • Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with a high degree of energy and a fast learner mentality, able to work effectively in a fast-paced environment.

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).

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/com-missioned 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.

$170,000.00 - $277,000.00/yr

Our Commitment

We're trailblazers that dream big, take risks, and challenge cybersecurity's status quo. It's simple: we can't accomplish our mission without diverse teams innovating, together.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for all qualified individuals with a disability. If you require assistance or accommodation due to a disability or special need, please contact us at View email address on click.appcast.io.

Palo Alto Networks is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity in our workplace, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or other legally protected characteristics.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Is role eligible for Immigration Sponsorship?: Yes