Principal Software Escalation Engineer

Palo Alto Networks • Charleston, SC

3d • Remote

About The Position

This role can be filled anywhere in the United States. We’re looking for a Principal Escalation Engineer to serve as a key architect of customer stability and product maturity within the Jupiter Group. This is a high-impact, cross-functional leadership role that sits at the intersection of R&D, Product, and Customer Success. You will not just resolve issues, you will fundamentally shape how our products are designed, built, and delivered. You will act as the "Voice of the Customer" within the engineering lifecycle, influencing architectural decisions to ensure our solutions are not only robust but also intuitive to deploy and manage. By treating supportability and onboarding as core product features, you will protect R&D capacity, accelerate delivery, and ensure our innovations succeed in the real world.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in the software industry (Technical Support, R&D, or Sustaining Engineering).
• A "Product-Engineering" Mindset: You can look at a technical design and immediately foresee how a customer will struggle with it. You care deeply about the user experience, not just the code execution.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience troubleshooting complex SaaS/Cloud environments (AWS preferred).
• Strong technical depth (scripting in Python/Bash/Go, reading code, SQL) to investigate issues independently and build tooling.
• Exceptional communication and leadership skills: You can challenge a Product Manager on a use case or guide a developer on a logging standard with equal confidence.
• Proven ability to drive cross-team initiatives and influence stakeholders without direct authority.
• Highly self-motivated with a strong sense of ownership and accountability.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in the Cyber Security domain.
• Background in Customer Success Engineering or Solutions Engineering.
• Experience defining architectural standards for observability and deployability.
• Experience defining "Definition of Ready" processes for escalation handling.

Responsibilities

• Join discovery and design sessions to validate proposed features against real-world customer use cases. You will provide critical feedback on design and UX before development begins, flagging if a feature will be difficult to implement, fails to address specific edge cases, or introduces friction that hinders adoption.
• Define the capabilities needed to streamline the entire customer journey. This includes specifying requirements for smoother product onboarding, self-service troubleshooting tools, and connectivity checks (e.g., demanding a prerequisite script for connector installation or built-in latency monitoring between components).
• Act as the single accountable authority for technical escalations, replacing reactive "ping-pong" with a structured, predictive pipeline that restores delivery predictability to the sprint teams.
• Transform how we monitor and maintain health by owning the logic behind PagerDuty alerts, reducing noise, and defining the "Definition of Ready" for operational handoffs.
• Act as a force multiplier by leading high-level training and knowledge transfer, enabling Support to resolve complex issues independently and lowering the escalation rate.
• Drive the post-incident process, ensuring that every failure results in a systemic improvement, whether it’s a code fix, a documentation update, or a process change.
• Use data from the field (trends, escaped bugs, and friction points) to drive strategic roadmap decisions, ensuring we prioritize technical debt and usability improvements alongside new features.

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

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