Senior Data Plane Engineer - Real-Time Network Security

Palo Alto Networks, Inc.; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 184,000 - 297,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks, Inc. is seeking a Data Plane Engineer to help build the core infrastructure powering our next-generation security platform.

You will design and develop detection and prevention engines with ultra-low latency and high throughput, operating at line speed to enforce complex policies. Based at our Santa Clara headquarters with a largely in-person team (3 days a week), you will collaborate with threat research and ML teams to push frontiers in real-time security, memory

Qualifications

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field.
• 5+ years of software engineering experience focusing on systems programming, high-performance computing, or networking infrastructure.
• Exceptional programming skills with a deep understanding of memory management, concurrency, and multi-threading.
• Knowledge of Rust is highly desired.
• Strong background in optimizing distributed systems for low-latency (sub-millisecond) performance.
• Familiarity with caching strategies, data streaming architectures, and network protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP/2, gRPC).

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and optimize our core inline detection/prevention engine, ensuring maximum throughput and absolute minimal latency for network traffic.
• Develop robust sidecar architectures to securely intercept, inspect, and route traffic in distributed and cloud-native environments.
• Engineer and maintain highly efficient trace store mechanisms for deep network telemetry, observability, and rapid threat forensics.
• Architect high-performance algorithms to achieve sub-ms policy evaluation, enabling real-time security enforcement at scale.
• Implement advanced memory management techniques, focusing on local cache optimization and high-speed data streaming pipelines.
• Collaborate closely with threat research and machine learning teams to seamlessly integrate advanced detection models directly into the data plane.

Job description

Palo Alto Networks, Inc. is seeking a Data Plane Engineer to help build the core infrastructure powering our next-generation security platform.

You will design and develop detection and prevention engines with ultra-low latency and high throughput, operating at line speed to enforce complex policies. Based at our Santa Clara headquarters with a largely in-person team (3 days a week), you will collaborate with threat research and ML teams to push frontiers in real-time security, memory