Senior Staff Software Engineer – Test Infrastructure, Automation & Performance

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

4d•$126,000 - $204,500•Hybrid

About The Position

At Palo Alto Networks®, we're united by a shared mission—to protect our digital way of life. We thrive at the intersection of innovation and impact, solving real-world problems with cutting-edge technology and bold thinking. Our Machine Identity platform secures identities, certificates, and cryptographic assets for many of the world's largest enterprises. As organizations increasingly rely on distributed systems and cloud-native applications, ensuring these products perform reliably across complex enterprise environments is critical. We're looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer to build the automation frameworks, performance tooling, and enterprise validation infrastructure that enable our engineering teams to deliver secure, scalable, and highly reliable software. This is a hands-on software engineering role where you'll write production-quality code every day to build automation for backend services, distributed systems, and enterprise infrastructure. Rather than focusing on traditional UI test automation, you'll engineer the frameworks, tooling, and environments that validate complex enterprise deployments at scale. If you've built automation, performance, or validation frameworks for enterprise software, networking, PKI, identity, cloud infrastructure, or cybersecurity products, we'd love to hear from you.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET), Performance Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or a related technical discipline.
Strong software engineering skills developing production-quality software using Python, Java, Go, or other modern programming languages, including experience building reusable libraries, frameworks, APIs, or tooling. Experience across multiple programming languages is highly valued.
Experience designing and building automation and integration testing frameworks for backend services, APIs, distributed systems, cloud-native applications, or enterprise software.
Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, REST APIs, and modern software architectures.
Hands-on experience with Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), X.509 certificates, SSL/TLS, certificate lifecycle management, Certificate Authorities, or Machine Identity technologies.
Strong understanding of networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/S, TLS, certificate-based authentication, and secure communications.
Experience working within Linux and Windows environments.
Hands-on experience with containerized applications using Docker and Kubernetes.
Experience designing, implementing, or maintaining CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, or similar technologies.
Experience building automation for performance, scalability, resiliency, or enterprise systems validation.
Strong debugging and root cause analysis skills across software, infrastructure, networking, cloud services, and distributed applications.
Demonstrated ability to lead technically complex initiatives, influence engineering decisions, and mentor other engineers through technical expertise.
Ability to write clean, maintainable, production-quality code following software engineering best practices.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Infrastructure as Code technologies such as Terraform or Ansible.
Experience with public cloud platforms such as GCP, AWS, or Azure.
Experience developing or testing cybersecurity, networking, identity, or enterprise infrastructure products.
Experience with modern UI automation frameworks such as Playwright or Cypress.

Responsibilities

Design, develop, and maintain automation frameworks for backend services, distributed systems, and cloud-native applications.
Build software that provisions, configures, and manages enterprise-scale validation environments.
Develop automation that validates functionality, scalability, resiliency, performance, security, and operational readiness.
Simulate complex customer environments spanning Linux, Windows, networking, PKI, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, and distributed architectures.
Partner closely with Development, DevOps, and Security Engineering teams to ensure products are designed for scalability, reliability, observability, and testability.
Enhance CI/CD pipelines and engineering tooling that improve developer productivity and release confidence.
Analyze and debug complex issues spanning software, infrastructure, networking, operating systems, cloud services, and distributed applications.
Participate in architecture reviews, technical design discussions, and code reviews while mentoring engineers on software engineering and automation best practices.