Principal Engineer Software - Backend (Prisma AIRS)

Palo Alto Networks•Office - USA - CA - Headquarters, CA

17d•$156,400 - $253,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Palo Alto Networks is pioneering the world's most comprehensive AI security platform through Prisma AIRS—protecting complex ecosystems of AI models, applications, and agents from development through runtime. As part of this mission, we are building a brand-new initiative on the AIRS team focused on advancing state-of-the-art AI/ML infrastructure and high-performance, distributed backend systems. We are recruiting senior technical leaders to drive this architecture from the ground up across the following levels: Sr. Staff Engineer | Principal Engineer | Sr. Principal Engineer. All roles are hybrid based on-site (3x/week) at our corporate Headquarters in Santa Clara, CA. As a Software Engineer, you will build the highly scalable, distributed cloud architectures that power our next-generation threat prevention ecosystem. You will develop the critical control plane and microservices that orchestrate our advanced AI models, manage security policies, and interface with our high-throughput data pipelines and inline engines. Your work will directly enable our customers to seamlessly deploy and manage cutting-edge AI security solutions at global scale.

Requirements

BS/MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience) with 8+ years of experience in software engineering, specifically focused on backend systems, platform architecture, or distributed cloud services.
Deep programming expertise in Golang (Go) or Python is required.
Proven track record of building and scaling RESTful APIs, gRPC services, and event-driven microservices.
Extensive experience with container orchestration platforms, specifically Docker and Kubernetes.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with the Rust programming language is highly desired.
Familiarity and hands-on experience with GCP Bigtable, BigQuery, and Spanner for managing large-scale distributed databases and analytics.
Familiarity with network security concepts, identity and access management (IAM), or modern authorization frameworks is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain highly scalable, fault-tolerant backend services and APIs that serve as the backbone for our new security platform.
Develop the robust control plane that orchestrates security policies, manages configurations, and coordinates deployments across distributed environments.
Write clean, performant, and secure code, with a primary focus on Golang or Python, ensuring system reliability under massive scale.
Architect and deploy microservices using container orchestration (Kubernetes) across Google Cloud Platform (GCP) infrastructure.
Build robust integration layers bridging the gap between high-speed data planes, massive telemetry pipelines, and user-facing management consoles.
Champion software engineering best practices, including rigorous automated testing, CI/CD pipeline development, and comprehensive system monitoring.