Principal Engineer (Console)

Palo Alto Networks • Office - USA - CA - Console Systems, CA

3d • Onsite

About The Position

Palo Alto Networks is hiring a Principal Engineer to build the core backend systems and distributed infrastructure that power Console’s AI agents. The role sits at the intersection of backend engineering, distributed systems, and agentic AI, with ownership of execution and orchestration infrastructure that enables agents to autonomously carry out complex workflows across enterprise applications.

The engineer will build foundational services and abstractions for agent orchestration, distributed execution, state management, and reliability. In partnership with AI and Product Engineering, the role will help shape an AI-native platform and scale it across the enterprise. This is a high-ownership position for someone who enjoys complex technical challenges, building systems from the ground up, and defining how autonomous AI systems operate in production.

Palo Alto Networks describes its mission as protecting its digital way of life and emphasizes innovation, collaboration, execution, integrity, and inclusion. Most teams work from the office full time, with flexibility when needed. The company is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities. Immigration sponsorship is available for this role.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of experience in backend, platform, or distributed systems engineering, building and shipping production-grade software.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including experience designing scalable backend services, APIs, and distributed architectures.
• Experience building complex systems involving asynchronous processing, concurrency, state management, or distributed workflows.
• Track record of owning and shipping technically complex products or foundational systems from the ground up, ideally in startup or high-growth environments.
• Strong architectural judgment and ability to navigate ambiguity, make thoughtful technical tradeoffs, and execute autonomously.
• Product-minded approach and strong instincts for designing simple, extensible systems that solve complex engineering challenges.
• Ability to collaborate across engineering disciplines and take ownership of technically challenging problems beyond immediate scope.
• Actively explores emerging AI technologies and development tools and has opinions on their impact on software design, development, and operations.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building agentic AI platforms, workflow orchestration engines, or distributed task-execution systems.
• Familiarity with LLM application architectures, agent frameworks, tool calling, or AI evaluation and observability.
• Experience building secure, multi-tenant SaaS platforms or enterprise integration frameworks.
• Experience building foundational platform services or developer frameworks adopted across engineering teams.
• Founding engineering or early-stage startup experience, particularly building 0-to-1 products or systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and build core backend services and distributed systems for Console’s AI agents and enterprise workflows.
• Own the architecture and development of agent execution and orchestration systems for complex, asynchronous, long-running workflows across enterprise applications.
• Build scalable workflow state management, concurrency, fault-tolerance, and recovery systems to support reliable agent execution in production.
• Develop shared APIs, execution frameworks, and reusable platform abstractions to accelerate development of agent capabilities.
• Build foundational integration and tool-execution systems that allow agents to securely interact with enterprise applications and APIs.
• Partner with AI and Product Engineering to evolve agentic architecture and translate emerging AI capabilities into scalable, production-grade systems.
• Drive technically complex projects from architecture through production, balancing performance, scalability, reliability, and development velocity.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed