Principal Software Engineer (Cloud Platform and AI Engineering)

Palo Alto Networks•Santa Clara, CA

1d•$147,000 - $237,500•Onsite

About The Position

Our ATP Cloud team is at the forefront of integrating AI into cybersecurity infrastructure — building intelligent systems that fundamentally change how we detect, respond to, and resolve incidents at scale. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will own the technical vision for our AI-powered platform, shaping how agentic workflows and LLM-driven automation are built into the backbone of our cloud services on GCP. This is a high-impact role where your decisions will directly influence product direction and team growth.

Requirements

BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent military experience required
8+ years of experience working on large cloud infrastructure platforms
Strong proficiency in Python and/or GoLang
Hands-on experience building AI agents or agentic workflows (e.g., using Google ADK, Vertex AI Agent Builder, or custom agent frameworks)
Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or similar agent-tool integration patterns
Practical experience working with LLMs, prompt engineering, and integrating AI models into backend services
Experience building semantic layers, KV caching, or similar techniques to optimize LLM performance and reduce inference cost
Solid skills in multi-threaded and multi-process programming and experience in distributed systems
Strong microservice development experience
Rich GCP experience and its suite of managed services (Vertex AI, Pub/Sub, GKE, Cloud Run, Secret Manager)
Solid knowledge and skills in Linux, Kubernetes, and Docker
Solid knowledge of web servers/proxies such as NGINX, Envoy
Comprehensive experience with SQL and NoSQL technologies such as MySQL, Redis, BigQuery
Hands-on experience with messaging/queuing systems such as Pub/Sub or Kafka
Solid understanding of system design, scalability, optimization, and performance metrics
Exceptional problem-solving skills and the ability to work in a fast-paced environment
Teamwork, problem-solving, and a can-do attitude

Responsibilities

Own the architecture and technical roadmap for AI agentic workflows that automate complex operational and engineering challenges
Design and scale backend systems on GCP that seamlessly integrate AI capabilities into production services
Drive the adoption of GCP-native AI tools (Vertex AI Agent Builder, Google ADK) and define how our team builds and ships AI agents
Partner with product managers, cybersecurity researchers, and AI application teams to translate business problems into AI-driven solutions
Set the engineering bar for the team — establish best practices for building, testing, and operating AI-augmented services in production
Influence technical direction across the organization and mentor engineers to grow their cloud and AI expertise