Senior Staff Engineer Software, Backend

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

2d•$126,000 - $204,500•Hybrid

About The Position

Our Mission 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. Here, everyone has a voice, and every idea counts. If you’re ready to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who are just as passionate as you are, you’re in the right place. Who We Are In order to be the cybersecurity partner of choice, we must trailblaze the path and shape the future of our industry. This is something our employees work at each day and is defined by our values: Disruption, Collaboration, Execution, Integrity, and Inclusion. We weave AI into the fabric of everything we do and use it to augment the impact every individual can have. If you are passionate about solving real-world problems and ideating beside the best and the brightest, we invite you to join us! We believe collaboration thrives in person. That’s why most of our teams work from the office full time, with flexibility when it’s needed. This model supports real-time problem-solving, stronger relationships, and the kind of precision that drives great outcomes. Job Summary About the Role We are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to join our Machine Identity Security team, focused on backend systems that power the control plane of our platform. In this role, you will design, build, and evolve scalable backend services, APIs, and integrations that enable secure machine identity and certificate lifecycle management at scale. You will work on high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems supporting large-scale request volumes and real-time system interactions. You will play a key role in developing control plane capabilities that support machine identity lifecycle management across cloud, hybrid, and enterprise environments. This includes building APIs, service-to-service interactions, integrations, and backend systems that are secure, reliable, and scalable. As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will serve as a technical leader within the team, owning critical backend services and platform capabilities. You will drive the design and delivery of complex technical initiatives, contribute to architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and partner cross-functionally to build scalable and secure machine identity solutions.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
5+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend services and distributed systems
Strong experience building backend services and APIs using Java OR Go
Experience designing and operating distributed systems and microservices architectures
Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), ideally in SaaS environments
Strong system design skills, including API design, scalability, reliability, performance optimization, and fault tolerance
Experience building and operating production systems under real-world load, including concurrency, throughput, and distributed system challenges
Experience building APIs, SDKs, or integrations consumed by internal and external customers
Experience with messaging, event-driven systems, or streaming platforms such as Kafka
Experience with CI/CD, containerization (Docker), and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes
Demonstrated ability to lead complex technical projects and drive delivery across multiple stakeholders
Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to technical decision-making within a team or domain
Strong problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills
Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, highly collaborative engineering environment and work in a hybrid capacity 3 days a week from HQ in Santa Clara, CA

Nice To Haves

Experience designing and building platform services, control planes, developer-facing APIs, or infrastructure-related software is highly desirable
Familiarity with identity, authentication, authorization, certificate management, or security-related systems is a plus

Responsibilities

Design, develop, and maintain backend services and APIs that power the Machine Identity Security control plane
Lead the technical design and implementation of scalable, reliable, and extensible backend systems
Own the architecture and technical execution of key backend services and platform capabilities from design through production operation
Build and maintain integrations between the control plane and external systems and tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, enterprise platforms)
Design and operate distributed systems supporting large-scale, multi-tenant SaaS environments
Optimize backend services for performance, scalability, reliability, observability, and operational efficiency
Partner closely with frontend, platform, product, and security teams to design APIs and service interfaces that support machine identity workflows
Drive engineering best practices around service design, API development, testing, observability, resiliency, and operational excellence
Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues across distributed systems and services
Lead complex technical initiatives within your domain and contribute to architecture discussions across related services and components
Provide technical leadership through design reviews, code reviews, mentoring, and collaboration with engineers across the team
Drive operational excellence through monitoring, performance tuning, reliability improvements, and incident response
Contribute to improvements in development workflows, CI/CD pipelines, testing practices, and engineering standards
Help evolve engineering practices that incorporate modern development tooling responsibly, with attention to security, correctness, and maintainability