Senior Principal Software Engineer (Foundational Platform)

Palo Alto Networks•San Jose, CA

10d•$183,600 - $297,000•Onsite

About The Position

At Palo Alto Networks everything starts and ends with our mission: Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life. We are a company built on the foundation of challenging and disrupting the way things are done, and we are looking for innovators who are as committed to shaping the future of cybersecurity as we are. Your Career: Help build what is next. Strata Cloud Manager (SCM) is a public cloud delivered management platform to manage all Palo Alto Networks Next generation network security solutions. It’s an easy-to-use, scalable and secure platform to operationalize complex deployments using the Palo Alto Networks network security portfolio. At the core of SCM are foundational capabilities powering the Shared Infrastructure ecosystem, including Identity & Access Management, API Gateway, and automated onboarding services. Senior Principal Software Engineers are: Technical experts that help accelerate adoption of the very best engineering practices, while maintaining knowledge on industry innovations, trends and practices. Experts who deliver on critical business needs and are recognized across the company as go-to engineering resources on given domains. Role models and mentors who exemplify the best of Palo Alto Networks culture Leaders who can communicate cogently with hands-on engineers Hands-on engineers that can code and build great products.

Requirements

15+ years of experience building large-scale enterprise SaaS applications, with 5+ years in lead technical architecture or Staff/Principal engineering roles for cloud-native platforms.
Deep hands-on experience building high-concurrency microservices in Go, Node.js, and Python.
Proven expertise with high-availability relational/transactional data stores (Cloud Spanner, Cloud SQL, AlloyDB) as well as NoSQL engines (Firestore, MongoDB, Redis).
Strong background in event-driven architectures utilizing message brokers (GCP Pub/Sub) and stateful workflow engines (Temporal).
Strong foundation in identity standards (OIDC, SAML, OAuth2), fine-grained authorization (OPA/OPAL, Permify, RBAC/ABAC), and service-mesh security (Istio mTLS, client-cert auth).
Hands-on experience with public cloud infrastructure (GCP/AWS), Kubernetes (GKE), Helm packaging, Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform), and modern GitOps CI/CD pipelines.
Proven track record of influencing cross-functional engineering teams, driving technical consensus, and delivering complex, multi-year initiatives.

Nice To Haves

Exposure to React micro-frontend architectures (Webpack Module Federation), API Gateway pattern design, or multi-tenant SaaS licensing systems.

Responsibilities

Architect & Evolve Platform Services: Lead the end-to-end architectural strategy and design for high-scale platform domains, including IAM/RBAC, fine-grained authorization, licensing/entitlement lifecycle, device management, and workflow orchestration.
Hands-on System Engineering: Design and build resilient, distributed microservices using Go, Node.js, Python, Google Cloud, and Temporal workflow orchestration.
Security & Zero-Trust Architecture: Enforce zero-trust security patterns across global services, integrating mTLS service-to-service authentication, OAuth2.0/OIDC, and fine-grained authorization models.
Technical Leadership & Strategy: Partner closely with Product Management, SRE, QA, and customer-facing teams to deliver robust end-to-end cloud solutions in a fast-paced environment.
Core Framework & Standards Development: Contribute to shared internal Go, Node, Python frameworks, core client SDKs, event-driven async patterns, and micro-frontend platform tooling.
Operational & Distributed Systems Excellence: Drive reliability initiatives, scalability improvements, latency optimization, and root-cause analysis for high-priority incidents across multi-region Kubernetes (GKE) deployments.
Talent Development: Recruit, mentor, and guide principal, senior, and mid-level engineers, fostering a technical culture of high quality and continuous learning.