Sr. Principal Engineer - Cortex Xpanse, Collections

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

3d•Onsite

About The Position

The Collections team is the foundational engine behind the Cortex Xpanse Attack Surface Management (ASM) platform. We architect, scale, and orchestrate global internet-scale discovery and scanning infrastructure. In this role, you will design distributed systems that continuously map the entire IPv4 and IPv6 internet, while building high-throughput data pipelines to create the foundation for Xpanse’s Attack Surface Management. As a Senior Principal Software Engineer, you will lead the technical vision across the Xpanse organization. You will architect robust, scalable solutions spanning multiple services and guide the end-to-end delivery of high-impact initiatives. Partnering closely with engineering leadership, you will define our long-term roadmap while actively mentoring and elevating engineering talent across the organization.

Requirements

10+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend systems.
A track record of setting technical direction, leading architectural decisions, and delivering massive, scalable systems into production.
Proficiency in Java or Golang is preferred, though strong experience with other modern backend languages is welcome.
Experience building data pipelines for real-time streaming or batch processing.
Experience with distributed systems, API design, and decoupling complex data architectures.
Experience with at least one major cloud platform (GCP, AWS, or Azure).

Nice To Haves

Expertise with any of the following: GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, MySQL, BigTable, Apache Beam.
Familiarity with low-level Internet protocols and high-throughput network scanning.
Experience with cybersecurity, attack surface management, or internet measurement domains.

Responsibilities

Build, optimize, and scale distributed backend scanning systems in Go.
Design and develop robust data collection pipelines using Apache Beam and Java multithreading frameworks.
Investigate new data sources and perform data analysis to estimate customer impact.
Take ownership of projects, drive them to completion, and support them in production.
Partner with engineering leadership, product managers, and downstream teams to define product strategy and enable the creation of new customer-facing features.
Mentor and grow engineers, setting a high bar for technical excellence, architecture design, and system reliability.