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Principal Software Engineer (Backend Prisma Access)

Palo Alto Networks

Santa Clara, United States, US$147k – $238konsite

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About this role

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks®, we’re united by a shared mission—to protect our digital way of life. We thrive at the intersection of innovation and impact, solving real-world problems with cutting-edge technology and bold thinking. Here, everyone has a voice, and every idea counts. If you’re ready to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who are just as passionate as you are, you’re in the right place.

Who We Are

In order to be the cybersecurity partner of choice, we must trailblaze the path and shape the future of our industry. This is something our employees work at each day and is defined by our values: Disruption, Collaboration, Execution, Integrity, and Inclusion. We weave AI into the fabric of everything we do and use it to augment the impact every individual can have. If you are passionate about solving real-world problems and ideating beside the best and the brightest, we invite you to join us!

We believe collaboration thrives in person. That’s why most of our teams work from the office full time, with flexibility when it’s needed. This model supports real-time problem-solving, stronger relationships, and the kind of precision that drives great outcomes. Job Summary

The Team Engineering - Our engineering team is at the core of our products and connected directly to the mission of preventing cyberattacks. We are constantly innovating — challenging the way we, and the industry, think about cybersecurity. Our engineers don’t shy away from building products to solve problems no one has pursued before. We define the industry instead of waiting for directions. We need individuals who feel comfortable in ambiguity, excited by the prospect of a challenge, and empowered by the unknown risks facing our everyday lives that are only enabled by a secure digital environment.

Your Career As a Principal Engineer on the Prisma Access team, you’ll design and build the distributed backend services that form the backbone of our platform. You’ll think broadly about all system components, weigh trade-offs for every design decision, and work with cutting-edge cloud technologies — integrating service APIs across multiple cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI) to deliver an optimal customer experience. This is an AI-native engineering role. You won’t just use AI as a productivity tool — you’ll build LLM-powered and agentic features directly into the product, design systems that detect and defend against AI-era threats, and operate with AI-assisted development workflows (Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, internal agents) as a daily standard. You’ll also shape our monitoring infrastructure, optimize data collection pipelines, analyze system disruptions, and develop solutions that drive measurable improvements in reliability. This is a rare opportunity to take ownership of a new product architecture and build it from the ground up, defining how AI changes what a cloud security platform can do.

Your Impact Platform & Distributed Systems • Analyze requirements, design, develop, and support highly scalable software features and infrastructure on our next-generation security platform — taking features from inception to production, ready for cloud-native deployment • Architect and build distributed microservices that process traffic and configuration at scale for thousands of enterprise customers • Write clean, testable, readable, and maintainable code that performs reliably under production load • Build and automate monitoring, observability, and alerting infrastructure to ensure platform reliability and rapid incident response • Participate in on-call rotations for production services and contribute to a culture of operational excellence   AI-Native Engineering • Design and ship LLM-powered and agentic product features — including policy authoring assistants, intelligent troubleshooting agents, automated RCA, anomaly detection, and natural-language admin experiences • Build production-grade RAG pipelines, tool-using agents, and multi-agent workflows over security telemetry, configuration data, and threat intelligence • Develop evaluation harnesses, golden traces, and CI/CD quality gates for AI features — measuring accuracy, latency, cost, and safety with the same rigor applied to traditional services • Implement guardrails, grounding, and human-in-the-loop controls to minimize hallucinations and ensure trustworthy behavior in security-critical contexts • Apply ML/AI techniques to networking and orchestration problems: traffic classification, capacity prediction, smart routing, drift detection, and zero-day anomaly identification Collaboration & Leadership • Collaborate cross-functionally with Product Management, Development, QA, SRE, and Customer Support to deliver the roadmap and improve customer outcomes • Actively guide testing strategy for critical components — including AI-powered test generation and autonomous QA workflows — balancing performance, supportability, and maintainability • Mentor junior engineers, lead design reviews, and contribute to engineering best practices, including responsible adoption of AI-assisted development workflows • Drive a results-oriented culture with a strong focus on execution, quality, and speed  

Qualifications Required Qualifications • B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field — or equivalent practical experience • 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building production-grade backend systems • Proficiency in one or more of: Go, Python, Java, or C++ • Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, operating systems, networking, and distributed systems • Hands-on experience architecting services on at least one major public cloud — AWS, GCP, Azure, or OCI • Working knowledge of networking protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP/HTTPS, TLS) and cloud network architectures (VPCs, load balancers, firewalls, NAT, peering) • Proven experience developing and scaling complex distributed systems

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