AI‑Driven Backend & Infra Engineering Manager

Palo Alto Networks; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 197,000 - 319,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks in Santa Clara, CA is seeking an Engineering Manager on the AI Posture team to lead a backend group of 8–10 engineers.

You will drive Go microservices architecture, optimize runtime performance, and partner with Infra and Platform teams while embracing AI‑driven development. This role requires empathetic leadership and a track record of scalable systems in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• 5–7 years of software engineering management leading distributed backend teams.
• 8+ years hands-on software engineering with Go and concurrent programming.
• Proven track record designing and operating high‑concurrency microservices at scale.
• Deep understanding of cloud platforms (GCP/AWS/Azure) with cost and latency optimization.
• Empathetic leadership with mentoring and building cohesive teams.
• Experience applying AI tools to improve development processes.

Responsibilities

• Empathetic Team Leadership: Build, mentor, and lead a backend engineering team using an empathy‑first approach.
• AI‑Savvy Engineering Culture: Drive the adoption of modern AI tooling across the software development life cycle.
• Backend & Microservices Architectures: Lead the design, execution, and optimization of high‑throughput, low‑latency microservices in Go.
• Infrastructure & Platform Interaction: Partner with Infra and Platform teams to optimize runtime efficiency and cloud resource usage.
• Roadmap & Cross‑Functional Alignment: Align with Product Management, Security, and SRE for multi‑quarter roadmaps.
• Operational Excellence & Observability: Enforce standards for deployment pipelines, telemetry, tracing, and incident response.
• Technical Communication: Clearly communicate trade‑offs and risks to leadership.

Skills

Empathetic leadership

Go (Golang)

Distributed systems

AI tooling adoption

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

Kafka

gRPC

BigQuery

Redis

MongoDB

Job description

Palo Alto Networks in Santa Clara, CA is seeking an Engineering Manager on the AI Posture team to lead a backend group of 8–10 engineers.

You will drive Go microservices architecture, optimize runtime performance, and partner with Infra and Platform teams while embracing AI‑driven development. This role requires empathetic leadership and a track record of scalable systems in a fast-paced environment.