Senior Principal Software Engineer, Tools & Platforms (Cortex)
About The Position
Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer to build innovative tools, platforms, and infrastructure that enable engineering excellence at scale. This influential technical leadership role combines deep software engineering expertise with strategic thinking and the ability to shape technology direction across teams and organizations. The engineer will bring extensive experience in large-scale distributed systems, developer platforms, and cloud-native infrastructure, serving as a trusted technical advisor and mentor. The role defines architectural vision and engineering standards, drives cross-functional technical initiatives, and develops solutions that improve developer productivity, operational excellence, and platform reliability. The position focuses on complex technical challenges and scalable systems serving engineering, platform engineering, SRE, and R&D teams.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- At least 9 years of hands-on experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, networking, storage, and compute platforms.
- At least 9 years of deep expertise with one or more major cloud providers: AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, and modern cloud-native architectures.
- At least 9 years of experience developing, deploying, and operating microservices on Kubernetes using modern cloud-native technologies.
- At least 7 years of hands-on programming experience in Python and/or Go.
- Demonstrated expertise in system architecture, scalability, reliability, performance optimization, security, observability, and operational excellence.
- At least 7 years of strong experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD automation, platform engineering, and developer productivity tooling.
- Expert knowledge of software quality practices, code health, testing strategies, performance analysis, diagnostics, debugging, and production support.
Nice To Haves
- Proven track record of leading enterprise-scale technical initiatives, influencing architecture across multiple engineering organizations, and driving engineering strategy without direct organizational authority.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence executive leadership, architects, and engineering teams across the organization.
Responsibilities
- Define and drive the long-term technical vision and architecture for developer platforms, infrastructure, and engineering tooling across multiple organizations.
- Architect, design, and implement resilient, secure, scalable, and highly available infrastructure and platform solutions for enterprise-scale engineering operations.
- Write high-quality platform and infrastructure software and set standards for maintainability, performance, security, and operational excellence.
- Lead the design and implementation of highly complex, business-critical systems and platform capabilities with organization-wide impact.
- Serve as the primary technical leader for large cross-functional initiatives, aligning teams on architecture, technology strategy, and implementation approaches.
- Lead architecture reviews and technical design discussions, building consensus and ensuring adherence to engineering best practices and long-term architectural principles.
- Establish engineering standards, reusable frameworks, and reference architectures that improve software quality, developer productivity, and platform consistency.
- Provide expert-level code reviews and technical mentorship on design, testing, performance, security, and maintainability.
- Drive modernization initiatives involving cloud-native technologies, Kubernetes, distributed systems, observability, automation, and platform engineering.
- Lead incident response and complex production troubleshooting, identifying systemic improvements to platform reliability and operational efficiency.
- Improve software delivery practices through CI/CD, infrastructure automation, and developer experience initiatives.
- Mentor and influence Principal, Senior, and Staff Engineers, fostering technical growth, innovation, and engineering excellence.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
