Principal Software Engineer (Backend Prisma Access)

Palo Alto Networks; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 147,000 - 237,500; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks in Santa Clara, CA is seeking a Principal Engineer for the Prisma Access team to design and build distributed backend services powering our cloud security platform. You will shape architecture and drive AI-native enhancements across multiple cloud providers.

You will own features end-to-end, mentor engineers, participate in on-call rotations, and collaborate with product, QA, SRE, and support to raise reliability and security standards.

Qualifications

• BS/MS in Computer Science or related field.
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building production-grade backend systems.
• Experience with Go, Python, Java, or C++ and distributed systems.
• Hands-on cloud architecture on AWS, GCP, Azure, or OCI.
• Experience integrating LLMs into production services and AI-driven features.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

• Design and build highly scalable backend features and infrastructure for cloud-native deployment.
• Architect distributed microservices handling traffic for thousands of customers.
• Develop AI-native features including LLM-powered components and RAG pipelines.
• Implement guardrails and monitoring for reliability and safety in AI features.
• Collaborate with product, QA, SRE, and support to deliver the roadmap.

Skills

Go

Python

Java

C++

Distributed systems

Cloud expertise

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science or related field

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

OCI

Kafka

DynamoDB

Cassandra

Spanner

OpenAI API

LangChain

Job description

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, every one 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 don'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, including large-scale distributed databases (e.g., Cassandra, DynamoDB, Spanner, CockroachDB) and messaging/streaming systems (e.g., Kafka, Pub/Sub, SQS, NATS)
• Hands-on experience integrating LLMs into production services - API-based (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) or self-hosted - including prompt engineering, structured outputs, function/tool calling, and basic eval design
• Fluency with AI-assisted development workflows - daily use of tools like Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar; able to apply them effectively without over-trusting them
• Strong written and verbal communication - able to author technical proposals, design specs, and architecture diagrams, and present them to both technical and non-technical audiences

Preferred Qualifications

• Production experience with agentic AI frameworks - LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, or equivalents
• Experience designing RAG architectures over enterprise data, including chunking strategies, embedding models, and vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector, Milvus, OpenSearch k-NN)
• Familiarity with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and patterns for exposing internal systems as tools to LLMs and agents
• Experience building evaluation pipelines for LLM systems - offline evals, A/B testing, golden datasets, regression suites, LLM-as-judge patterns

Compensation Disclosure

The compensation offered for this position will depend on qualifications, experience, and work location. For candidates who receive an offer at the posted level, the starting base salary (for non-sales roles) or base salary + commission target (for sales/com-missioned roles) is expected to be the annual range listed below. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found here (https://benefits.paloaltonetworks.com/).

$147,000.00 - $237,500.00/yr

Our Commitment

We're trailblazers that dream big, take risks, and challenge cybersecurity's status quo. It's simple: we can't accomplish our mission without diverse teams innovating, together.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for all qualified individuals with a disability. If you require assistance or accommodation due to a disability or special need, please contact us at [e-mail].

Palo Alto Networks is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity in our workplace, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or other legally protected characteristics.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Is role eligible for Immigration Sponsorship?: Yes