Staff Engineer Software

Palo Alto Networks • Needham, MA

9d • Hybrid

About The Position

This role requires the employee to be in the Needham office 3x per week. We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to drive technical execution and contribute to the ongoing evolution of our platform. In this role, you will take technical ownership of core platform components, translate ambiguous feature requirements into clean, scalable software, and leverage AI-first development workflows to accelerate delivery and elevate code quality. You will serve as a key technical anchor—designing modular systems, optimizing workflows, and ensuring production reliability.

Requirements

• 2+ years of professional software engineering experience building, shipping, and maintaining production-grade applications.
• Hands-on experience building enterprise-grade applications using the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, Angular, Node.js).
• Practical experience building, deploying, and operating scalable solutions within the AWS ecosystem.
• Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools and prompt engineering, paired with peer-review rigor to verify AI outputs for correctness, safety, and security.
• Solid foundation in designing clean APIs, refactoring component code bases, and applying standard design patterns for long-term maintainability.
• Strong debugging skills with experience in writing robust tests (unit/integration), participating in RCA processes, and resolving production issues.
• Demonstrated ability to clarify requirements, adapt technical tactics as priorities shift, raise blockers early, and collaborate effectively with PM, Design, and engineering peers.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with IAM, PAM, IGA, or Secrets Management platforms.
• Fluency in TypeScript along with automated testing frameworks such as Jest, Playwright, or JMeter for load/stress testing.
• Practical experience with CI/CD pipelines, feature flagging tools, and modern monitoring/logging frameworks.
• Experience structuring codebase documentation and architecture for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and reusable prompt templating.

Responsibilities

• Drive End-to-End Feature Delivery: Take ownership of complex feature sets and components. Break down ambiguous requirements into execution-ready tasks, estimate work accurately, and reliably deliver high-quality solutions end-to-end.
• Implement AI-First Engineering Practices: Apply high AI tool fluency and prompt engineering to streamline daily development. Rigorously review and validate AI-generated code to prevent security gaps, logic defects, and hallucinations before committing.
• Design for Extensibility & Modularity: Propose clean feature designs and API interfaces using standard architectural patterns. Write modular, testable code that gracefully balances performance, reliability, and maintainability.
• Practice Defensive & Secure Engineering: Anticipate edge cases (limits, nulls, complex authorization paths) early in the development cycle. Write integration tests and defensive logic to lower defect escape rates.
• Translate Requirements into Intuitive Workflows: Partner closely with Product and Design to understand user scenarios, clarify acceptance criteria early, and build seamless frontend and backend implementations that reduce friction.
• Maintain Production Service Excellence: Act as a champion for component health. Actively participate in root cause analysis (RCA) on production incidents, implement durable fixes, and reduce MTTR.
• Foster Team Capability & Knowledge Sharing: Share technical learnings, document tribal knowledge, and author "RAG-ready" technical notes. Write clear RFCs and tickets to keep partners informed and help uplevel peer engineers.

Benefits

• The compensation offered for this position will depend on qualifications, experience, and work location. For candidates who receive an offer at the posted level, the starting base salary (for non-sales roles) or base salary + commission target (for sales/com-missioned roles) is expected to be the annual range listed below. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found here.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed