Principal Software Engineer ( Backend )

Palo Alto Networks

1d•Onsite

About The Position

Palo Alto Networks' ADEM (Autonomous Digital Experience Management) group is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to serve as a primary architect and technical visionary for our backend ecosystem. In this high-impact role, you will be responsible for the technical roadmap of the ADEM data plane and control plane, ensuring our infrastructure remains the gold standard for SASE observability. You will solve the most complex distributed systems challenges, mentor the next generation of technical leaders, and bridge the gap between long-term product vision and world-class engineering execution.

Requirements

12+ years of software engineering experience, with a significant portion dedicated to designing and operating large-scale distributed systems in a cloud-native environment.
Advanced AI-Augmented Development: As a leader in engineering efficiency, you must be an expert in leveraging AI-powered development tools—including Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, and GitHub Copilot—to radically accelerate the SDLC and automate complex refactoring and testing workflows.
Distributed Systems Mastery: Proven track record of architecting systems that handle billions of events per day with strict sub-second latency requirements using Rust ,Go (Golang), Java, or Python.
GCP Principal-Level Expertise: Deep authoritative knowledge of the GCP ecosystem (GKE, Spanner, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Dataflow) and the ability to optimize cloud spend through sophisticated architectural choices (FinOps).
Data Plane Innovation: Experience building high-throughput, low-latency data pipelines using technologies like Kafka, Pulsar, or Flink.
Security & Networking Visionary: Deep understanding of Zero Trust architecture, L4-L7 networking, and advanced encryption standards to ensure ADEM remains the most secure platform in the industry.
Education: BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent high-level professional experience.

Nice To Haves

A history of contributing to open-source projects (e.g., Kubernetes, Prometheus, Istio) or speaking at industry conferences is highly desirable.

Responsibilities

Technical Strategy & Roadmap: Define the long-term architectural vision for ADEM backend services, ensuring scalability to support hundreds of millions of global endpoints and multi-petabyte telemetry streams.
Architectural Governance: Lead the "Design Review Board" for the ADEM org, ensuring that all new services adhere to Secure AI by Design, high-availability patterns, and cost-efficient GCP utilization.
AI/ML Integration at Scale: Drive the transition from traditional analytics to Agentic AI workflows, overseeing the backend orchestration required to power LLM-driven autonomous remediation.
Cross-Functional Leadership: Partner with Product Management, Data Science, and DevOps to translate ambiguous business requirements into robust, high-performance technical specifications.
Engineering Excellence & Mentorship: Act as a force multiplier by mentoring Staff and Senior engineers, fostering a culture of rigorous testing, high code quality, and proactive technical debt management.
Crisis Leadership: Serve as the ultimate technical escalation point for complex, systemic production issues, leading post-mortems that drive permanent architectural improvements.