Sr. Principal Software Engineer - Backend, Identity & Access Management (Chronosphere)

Palo Alto Networks•New York City, NY

1d•Remote

About The Position

The Chronosphere team, a Palo Alto Networks company, is seeking a senior technical leader for its Identity & Access Management platform. This platform owns authentication and access control, including APIs, libraries, services, and data stores that other engineering teams integrate with to control access within the product. The team is rapidly growing and increasing its investment in this critical area. The systems managed by this team are essential for security and reliability, sitting in front of all dashboards, APIs, and customer data. The roadmap is heavily influenced by customer needs, such as access control granularity, SSO and SCIM coverage, and service account scoping. The role involves setting architectural direction, leading complex projects, hands-on coding, and mentoring other engineers.

Requirements

A track record of taking an ambitious vision from an idea to production.
The ability to work through ambiguity collaboratively with customers and partners toward iterative execution.
Experience owning initiatives that span several teams from inception to delivery, working alongside product managers, designers, and other engineers.
Experience with large scale distributed systems, and the judgment to weigh reliability, scalability, security, cost, and time-to-market trade-offs.
Strong product sense: ability to hold a technical and product point of view simultaneously, identify critical platform gaps, and translate customer/contractual requirements into engineering priorities.
Use data to make the case for architectural investment.
Experience building platform capabilities that other engineering teams adopt, and driving adoption through collaboration and negotiation.
Experience partnering and negotiating with infrastructure engineering teams, helping to align priorities, and building toward a shared technical vision.
The technical depth to lead design reviews, assess risk in a design, understand critical code paths, and evaluate engineering trade-offs directly.
Familiarity with enterprise software and the expectations security-conscious customers place on access control, authentication, and auditability.
The curiosity and motivation to learn a deep, complex domain, and the habit of seeking feedback on your own designs.
Fluency in a system level language such as Go, C++, Java, C#, or Rust.
Communication skills to frame complex trade-offs for a range of audiences, from engineers on other teams to product managers to leadership.
A flexible, collaborative working style, and a way of working with other teams that raises the technical bar without routing every decision through you.

Nice To Haves

Deep IAM specialization

Responsibilities

Lead and evolve the design of our granular access control framework: a sophisticated, scalable, and reliable system that nearly every other product team integrates with.
Set the architectural direction for the platform on a 1-3 year horizon, including APIs for other teams, shippable iterations, build-versus-buy decisions, how we manage technical debt, and how to scale reliably.
Lead initiatives that span teams, negotiating priorities, resolving dependencies, and influencing peers without authority.
Ship and maintain platform capabilities in Go, deployed on Kubernetes across cloud platforms such as AWS and GCP.
Take on the parts of the system that are the most complex and most frequently used.
Own the reliability of these systems in production, monitor SLOs, and take timely action to meet reliability goals.
Identify security and reliability risks, and build systems to address and mitigate them.
Eliminate systemic failure modes and toil through architectural, deployment, and tooling improvements.
Partner with product manager to assess customer needs and co-create the roadmap, grounding direction in buildability.
Balance large investments alongside a steady cadence of customer requests while ensuring predictable delivery pace.
Partner with teams who will build on shipped capabilities, building relationships and engaging them early and often.
Work with security and compliance partners on reviews, audits, and commitments.
Track industry trends in identity and access management, including new security models and AI agent-related access control questions, and translate them into technical strategies.
Mentor engineers on the team and in the organization.
Help grow the team by interviewing and onboarding new engineers.