Principal Backend Engineer, AI Security Platform

Palo Alto Networks, Inc.; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 156,000 - 253,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a highly skilled Principal Software Engineer for the Prisma AIRS platform in Santa Clara, CA. You will design, develop, and optimize backend services powering AI security, shaping technical direction and ensuring production-grade solutions.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and drive architecture decisions while maintaining a strong focus on reliability and performance in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, building and designing large distributed systems and web services in the cloud.
• Expertise in at least one strongly typed programming language (Go, Java, C#, C++) or modern Python (type hints, Pydantic).
• Experience with a major cloud provider like GCP (preferred), AWS, or Azure.
• Hands-on experience with SQL/NoSQL databases such as Postgres, MySQL, Spanner, BigQuery, MongoDB.
• Experience with graph databases such as Neo4j is highly desired.
• Experience with a queuing system such as RabbitMQ or Kafka or Pub/Sub.
• Experience with microservices architecture (Kubernetes, GKE, EKS, AKS, Docker, Serverless).
• Experience writing comprehensive unit and end-to-end tests.
• On-call troubleshooting capabilities and bug isolation/verification.
• Experience partnering with product managers and frontend engineers.
• Experience leading large projects end-to-end.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for shared platform services and drive architecture decisions across the Prisma AIRS organization.
• Collaborate with product managers, frontend software engineers, product designers, and infrastructure software engineers to ensure success.
• Design and build innovative and solid products to ensure customers can use AI securely.
• Own new features from start to finish across the product development cycle, ensuring production-readiness, scalability, and reliability.
• Design, build, and operate production security services with high reliability and performance.
• Develop expertise in new technologies and keep up with evolving AI security landscape.
• Mentor engineers and raise the engineering bar across teams.

Skills

Distributed systems

Go

Java

Python

Cloud platforms

SQL/NoSQL

Kafka/RabbitMQ

Kubernetes/Docker

Unit & E2E testing

On-call troubleshooting

Product collaboration

Big projects leadership

Education

BS/MS in Computer Science

Equivalent professional experience

Tools

Neo4j

Grafana

Terraform

GitLab

GitHub

Docker

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a highly skilled Principal Software Engineer for the Prisma AIRS platform in Santa Clara, CA. You will design, develop, and optimize backend services powering AI security, shaping technical direction and ensuring production-grade solutions.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and drive architecture decisions while maintaining a strong focus on reliability and performance in a fast-paced environment.