Sr Staff Software Engineer (Chronosphere)

Palo Alto Networks•Chicago, IL

1d•Remote

About The Position

At Palo Alto Networks®, the mission is to protect the digital way of life by solving real-world problems with cutting-edge technology and bold thinking. The company values Disruption, Collaboration, Execution, Integrity, and Inclusion, and integrates AI into its operations to augment individual impact. This role is remote, fostering a culture of trust, accountability, and shared success within hybrid teams that collaborate across geographies. The position is for an experienced product-driven engineer to help customers monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize systems at scale. The platform ingests and analyzes high-volume telemetry data (metrics, logs, traces, and events) to enable engineers to understand system behavior, improve reliability, and reduce MTTR in cloud-native environments. The senior engineer will design and build core systems for the observability platform, focusing on highly scalable distributed systems that ingest, store, query, and process massive volumes of telemetry data in near real time. This role requires strong systems thinking, API design skills, and experience building reliable systems.

Requirements

Strong experience in one or more backend languages (e.g., Go, Java, Python, Rust)
Experience using AI coding assistants (e.g., Cursor, Claude) as part of day-to-day software development
Experience building and operating highly available systems in production
Experience working with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure)
Experience designing APIs (REST, gRPC, GraphQL)
A strong sense of ownership and can independently own projects from inception to delivery
An effective collaborative working style

Responsibilities

Work on technically challenging problems with some of the largest distributed systems in the world
Directly impact how engineering teams debug production systems
Help shape the architecture of a rapidly scaling platform
Collaborate with deeply technical teammates and customers
Operating systems that process large-scale real-world production traffic
Design and build scalable backend services that process high-volume telemetry data
Develop systems for ingestion, storage, indexing, and querying of time-series and event data
Improve performance, reliability, and cost efficiency of distributed systems
Collaborate with frontend teams to design clean, efficient APIs
Contribute to data modeling strategies for high-cardinality observability workloads
Participate in architecture reviews and technical design discussions
Improve system observability (we use our own product heavily) and reliability
Mentor engineers and help raise engineering standards