Principal Backend Engineer, Machine Identity Platform

Palo Alto Networks; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 147,000 - 238,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join our Machine Identity Security team, focused on backend systems powering the control plane of our platform. Lead design and evolution of scalable backend services, APIs, and integrations for secure machine identity and certificate lifecycle management at scale.

You will work on high‑throughput, low‑latency distributed systems supporting large-scale request volumes.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS or related field.
• 8+ years in software development or backend/control plane systems.
• Strong experience building backend services and APIs using Java; Go is a plus.
• Deep experience with distributed systems and microservices.
• Cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP) in SaaS environments.
• API design, performance optimization, and scalability patterns.
• CI/CD, containerization (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with identity, authentication, or security systems is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and development of backend services and APIs for the Machine Identity Security control plane.
• Own backend architecture for scalable, reliable, and extensible services.
• Define exposure through APIs, SDKs, and integrations.
• Build and guide integrations with Terraform, Ansible, and enterprise platforms.
• Design high-throughput distributed systems for multi-tenant SaaS environments and ensure data consistency.
• Mentor engineers and drive architectural decisions across teams.
• Improve development workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and engineering standards.

Skills

Java

Go

Distributed systems

CI/CD

Kubernetes

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Tools

AWS

Docker

Kafka

GCP

Azure

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join our Machine Identity Security team, focused on backend systems powering the control plane of our platform. Lead design and evolution of scalable backend services, APIs, and integrations for secure machine identity and certificate lifecycle management at scale.

You will work on high‑throughput, low‑latency distributed systems supporting large-scale request volumes.