Senior Data Plane Engineer: Low-Latency Security Networking

Jobs Paloaltonetworks; United States; On-site; USD 184,000 - 297,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Data Plane Engineer to design and optimize our core inline detection/prevention engines for a next‑gen security platform. You will build high‑throughput, low‑latency networking components and sidecar architectures in collaboration with threat research and ML teams.

The role is based in Santa Clara with strong on‑site culture; base salary ranges from $183,600 to $297,000 annually, with RSUs and bonus possible.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering focusing on systems programming or networking infrastructure.
• Strong memory management, concurrency, and multi‑threading knowledge.
• Experience optimizing distributed systems for low latency.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and optimize our core inline detection/prevention engine for maximum throughput and minimal latency.
• Develop sidecar architectures to securely intercept, inspect, and route traffic in distributed and cloud environments.
• Engineer efficient trace stores for telemetry, observability, and forensics.
• Create high‑performance algorithms for sub‑ms policy evaluation at scale.
• Improve memory management with local cache optimization and fast data pipelines.
• Collaborate with threat research and ML teams to integrate detection models into the data plane.

Skills

High‑performance computing

Memory management

Concurrency & multi‑threading

Low‑latency networking

Distributed systems

Education

BS/MS in Computer Science or Computer Engineering

Tools

Rust

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Data Plane Engineer to design and optimize our core inline detection/prevention engines for a next‑gen security platform. You will build high‑throughput, low‑latency networking components and sidecar architectures in collaboration with threat research and ML teams.

The role is based in Santa Clara with strong on‑site culture; base salary ranges from $183,600 to $297,000 annually, with RSUs and bonus possible.