Senior Engineering Manager, Enterprise AI Products

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

2d • $223,000 - $306,500 • Onsite

About The Position

The Team The Information Technology (IT) team at Palo Alto Networks is at the forefront of securing our own enterprise. We are a team of builders and innovators, responsible for the architecture, implementation, and maintenance of the systems and infrastructure that power our global operations. From network security to cloud applications, we ensure that our own employees have the secure, reliable, and cutting-edge tools they need to protect our digital way of life. Joining our IT team means you’ll be a critical part of our ‘customer zero’ story, using and securing our own products to solve complex challenges. Job Summary As the Senior Engineering Manager for the Enterprise AI Products Team, you will lead the end-to-end execution behind our next generation of internal and external AI-driven applications, intelligent agents, and automated solutions. This role is built for a sharp, deeply technical manager who rejects hands-off administration and thrives on staying close to the architecture, infrastructure, and code. In this role, you will embody T-shaped leadership. Your vertical depth is rooted in elite technical expertise—AI engineering, Large Language Models (LLMs), and high-scale distributed systems. Your horizontal breadth is your capability to understand and speak the language of other disciplines across the enterprise, including Product Management, Sales, Marketing, Finance, HR, and Legal. You don't just manage engineering tasks; you connect disparate ideas, translate business needs into technical realities, and align cross-functional stakeholders to make better, faster product decisions. Most importantly, you are an agile leader who effectively modulates your depth—possessing the capability and willingness to make targeted individual contributions or go to any technical level when the situation demands.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, distributed systems, or enterprise architecture, with at least 4+ years of direct engineering management experience overseeing high-performing technical teams.
• A proven track record as an individual contributor with active, hands-on fluency in programming languages such as Python, Go, or Java.
• Direct experience building, deploying, and scaling enterprise applications utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and multi-modal agent frameworks.
• Deep familiarity with modern AI/ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow) and cloud ecosystems (AWS SageMaker, Google Vertex AI, Azure ML), alongside streaming data platforms, data lakes, and vector search indexing.
• Proven ability to partner with and influence non-engineering functions (e.g., Product, Finance, Legal, HR) by understanding their core drivers and constraints.
• Experience navigating highly fluid, rapid-growth technical environments where prioritizing "scale vs. pragmatic shipping" is a daily requirement.
• Exceptional ability to distill complex architectural bottlenecks into clear, actionable narratives for junior engineers up to VP and C-level executives.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical field.
• Prior experience in a technical lead, technical consulting, or solutions architecture capacity, acting as a bridge between deep engineering groups and diverse business domains.
• Deep understanding of cybersecurity principles specifically applied to guarding, monitoring, and deploying secure AI systems.
• Experience contributing to open-source AI projects or a history of bringing cutting-edge research workflows into enterprise-grade products.

Responsibilities

• Maintain strong technical anchoring. You will actively engage in system design, perform rigorous code reviews, and dive straight into the trenches to pair-program, debug, or unblock critical production issues alongside your team.
• Solve complex enterprise challenges by balancing your technical depth (the vertical) with a broad understanding of business functions like Marketing, Finance, and Sales (the horizontal). Connect technical capabilities with business goals to drive seamless alignment across non-technical teams.
• Lead a talent-dense team through the full lifecycle of production-grade AI applications, multi-modal systems, and agentic workflows. Translate complex, fast-moving business requirements into concrete technical roadmaps and hardened software foundations.
• Focus ruthlessly on developer velocity and systems thinking. Design internal tooling, automated evaluation pipelines, and guardrails that make it easy for other engineering and product teams to safely deploy AI features without needing to know every underlying infrastructure detail.
• Instill high-rigor engineering practices, including automated model training, versioning, deployment, and monitoring. Drive automated testing strategies for drift detection, while building self-healing infrastructure to minimize operational toil.
• Partner with security, legal, and data governance teams to build privacy-preserving data interfaces, ensuring all AI products strictly adhere to compliance frameworks, data privacy laws, and secure AI deployment practices.

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: Senior