Sr Staff Engineer Software

Palo Alto Networks•Boston, MA

4d•$126,000 - $204,500•Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to advance the architectural evolution and technical direction of our platform. In this role, you will tackle high-ambiguity technical challenges, set the engineering vision, and pioneer AI-first development workflows to accelerate feature delivery and elevate software quality. You will take end-to-end ownership of critical system capabilities—designing for scale, optimizing cycle times, and establishing resilient security and operational patterns.

Requirements

Full-Stack Mastery: Deep hands-on experience building enterprise-grade applications using the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, Angular, Node.js).
Cloud Infrastructure Leadership: Proven track record architecting, deploying, and operating scalable solutions within the AWS ecosystem.
AI Tooling & Output Verification: Expertise in prompt and context engineering, utilizing AI tools within software development while exercising peer-review rigor to verify AI outputs for correctness and security.
Navigating Ambiguity: Demonstrated ability to remain highly productive through fluid requirements, adapting technical tactics while maintaining alignment with business goals.
System Design & Extensibility: Strong foundation in designing clean APIs, refactoring complex code bases, and making explicit architectural trade-offs for long-term scalability.
Production & Operational Ownership: Extensive experience debugging complex production services, driving RCAs, and implementing systemic prevention mechanisms.
Cross-Functional Influence: Skilled at aligning with PM, Design, and engineering partners, writing clear RFCs, and mentoring teams without needing formal authority.

Nice To Haves

Identity & Access Security Domain: Direct experience with IAM, PAM, IGA, or Secrets Management platforms.
Modern Frontend & Quality Tooling: Fluency in TypeScript along with automated testing frameworks such as Jest, Playwright, or JMeter for load and stress testing.
DevOps & Observability Ecosystems: Practical experience with progressive delivery, CI/CD pipelines, feature flagging tools, and modern monitoring frameworks.
Context Engineering & Retrieval: Experience structuring codebase documentation and architecture for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and reusable prompt templating.

Responsibilities

Drive End-to-End Feature Delivery: Take complete ownership of complex, end-to-end feature delivery by breaking down work, managing commitments, and systematically reducing cycle time and rework.
Lead AI-First Engineering Practices: Apply high AI tool fluency and prompt/context engineering to design AI-assisted workflows across the agentic SDLC. Rigorously evaluate AI-generated code to prevent hallucinations, security gaps, and logic defects.
Architect for Scale & Extensibility: Design clear system interfaces and extensible logic that minimize maintainer toil, gracefully handling performance, reliability, and scale trade-offs.
Practice Defensive & Secure Engineering: Enforce defensive coding practices across edge conditions, limits, and complex authorization paths to reduce defect escape rates.
Simplify Workflows & Enhance User Experience: Partner with PM and Design to translate product requirements into intuitive code, using prototypes and telemetry to simplify complex user flows and reduce friction.
Ensure Production Service Excellence: Act as a champion for service health by driving root cause analysis (RCA) on production incidents, reducing MTTR, and implementing durable fixes.
Foster Team Capability & Knowledge Sharing: Run technical experiments, share modern design patterns, document tribal knowledge, and author "RAG-ready" technical notes to onboard and uplevel engineering peers.