Sr Staff Software Software
About The Position
Palo Alto Networks is hiring a senior staff software engineer to develop enterprise-grade security-as-a-service offerings. The role spans the product lifecycle and involves building resilient, production-ready backend architectures for complex, ambiguous technical challenges. The engineer will work across system boundaries and collaborate with Product Management, SRE, ML, Quality Engineering, and software engineering teams to develop, deploy, and scale cloud software and model-serving infrastructure. The position focuses on scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems, microservices, and high-throughput APIs that meet strict service-level objectives. It also includes identifying bottlenecks and scaling opportunities, optimizing performance and efficiency, and applying modern engineering practices such as agentic coding workflows and spec-driven development. The role is primarily office-based, with flexibility when needed.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field and at least 5 years of relevant industry experience, or a Master's degree and at least 4 years of experience.
- Expertise designing, building, and operating highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems.
- Exceptional programming skills in Python or Golang.
- Experience designing enterprise-wide microservices architectures and building and deploying high-throughput, globally scaled APIs to meet strict SLOs, maximize throughput, and reduce production compute costs.
- Experience with cloud-native solutions, relational or NoSQL databases, Kubernetes, enterprise CI/CD tools such as GitLab or ArgoCD, and observability tools such as Grafana or Prometheus.
Nice To Haves
- Experience developing, automating, and executing QA processes, including test plans, test cases, software tools, and cloud infrastructure to improve product quality and the efficiency of cloud-system deployment and maintenance.
- Exposure to building and deploying complex agentic workflows, tool-use pipelines, or multi-agent orchestrations.
- Experience with GCP is preferred.
Responsibilities
- Participate in all aspects of the product lifecycle.
- Collaborate with Product Management, SRE, ML, and Quality Engineering teams to deliver enterprise-grade security-as-a-service offerings.
- Address complex technical challenges across system boundaries and translate product and security vision into resilient, production-ready backend architectures.
- Identify technical bottlenecks and scaling opportunities, and optimize throughput, latency, performance, efficiency, and resource utilization.
- Learn and implement modern engineering practices, including agentic coding workflows and spec-driven development.
- Work with software engineering, product management, and SRE teams during software product development and deployment.
- Execute large-scale enterprise systems with model-serving infrastructure and enable scalable integration across backend and partner engineering services.
- Develop and automate new software features in a cloud environment.
Benefits
- Compensation may include restricted stock units and a bonus.
- Employee benefits are referenced, but specific benefits are not listed in the description.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
