AI-First Enterprise Architect — Senior Staff Engineer

Palo Alto Networks; Santa Clara (CA); Hybrid; USD 144,000 - 233,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking an experienced AI Engineering professional to design and deliver AI-first enterprise applications that power critical business workflows. You will shape scalable architectures at the intersection of full‑stack development, cloud‑native services, and applied AI.

You will drive AI orchestration, evaluation, guardrails, and production observability while mentoring engineers and advancing security and reliability across multiple teams.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Senior: 5+ years of software engineering experience (or 3+ with a Master’s degree).
• Staff: 8+ years of software engineering experience (or 6+ with a Master’s degree, or 3+ with a PhD).
• Strong full‑stack and distributed systems engineering experience with demonstrated ownership of complex production systems.
• Production experience designing and building AI‑integrated systems using LLMs, RAG, embeddings, tool calling, or agentic workflows.
• Experience with AI orchestration, retrieval, evaluation, guardrails, human‑in‑the‑loop workflows, and production observability.
• Strong understanding of APIs, enterprise data, cloud‑native architecture, security, reliability, and production operations.
• Proven ability to translate ambiguous problems into clear technical architectures and influence technical direction.

Responsibilities

• Architect and deliver production AI‑first enterprise applications across full‑stack systems, cloud‑native services, and applied AI.
• Design agentic and retrieval‑based systems utilizing LLMs, RAG, embeddings, tool calling, and multi‑step workflows.
• Establish robust practices for AI evaluation, guardrails, security, observability, reliability, latency, and cost management.
• Translate ambiguous business problems into scalable technical architectures and drive complex initiatives through production.
• Build reusable engineering patterns and shared capabilities applicable across multiple applications and development teams.
• Drive AI‑native engineering practices using tools like Cursor and Claude Code while mentoring engineers and raising technical standards.

Skills

Full-stack engineering

Distributed systems

AI-integrated systems

APIs & cloud-native

Production observability

Mentoring engineers

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Engineering

Advanced degree (Master/PhD)

Tools

TypeScript

Node.js/NestJS

React

Python

SQL

Vertex AI

LangChain/LangGraph

MCP

A2A protocols

Docker

Kubernetes

Cursor

Claude Code

Windsurf

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking an experienced AI Engineering professional to design and deliver AI-first enterprise applications that power critical business workflows. You will shape scalable architectures at the intersection of full‑stack development, cloud‑native services, and applied AI.

You will drive AI orchestration, evaluation, guardrails, and production observability while mentoring engineers and advancing security and reliability across multiple teams.