Senior Data Platform Architect - Distributed Systems

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

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a senior data platform engineer to design and operate scalable, fault-tolerant pipelines and streaming services. You will work with Product Management, SRE, ML Engineering, and Security teams to deliver high-throughput capabilities.

The role emphasizes cloud-native stacks, distributed processing, and mentoring across engineering levels, with a strong focus on latency optimization and resource efficiency.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field (10+ years experience) or Master's with 8+ years.
• Deep experience designing scalable distributed systems with Golang and Python.
• Hands-on with Apache Beam or Apache Spark in data platforms.
• Experience architecting or deploying complex agentic workflows and data pipelines.
• Proven ability to profile, benchmark, and tune high-throughput pipelines for latency and efficiency.
• Cloud-native data stacks (GCP/Dataflow), Pub/Sub, Kafka, BigQuery, Iceberg, Kubernetes, Terraform.
• Ability to drive consensus across multi-team boundaries and mentor senior engineers.

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver high-throughput data platform capabilities and streaming services.
• Architect and build resilient, multi-source batch and streaming engines for analytics workflows.
• Profile, benchmark, and tune distributed execution DAGs, state storage, and compute resources.
• Evangelize and implement modern software engineering practices, including testing and scalable coding workflows.
• Mentor senior and junior engineers and lead architectural reviews to raise technical excellence.

Skills

Golang

Python

Distributed systems

Big data pipelines

Mentoring

Team collaboration

Cloud data platforms

Education

Bachelor's in CS

Master's in CS

Tools

Apache Beam

Apache Spark

GCP Dataflow

Kafka

Pub/Sub

BigQuery

Iceberg

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a senior data platform engineer to design and operate scalable, fault-tolerant pipelines and streaming services. You will work with Product Management, SRE, ML Engineering, and Security teams to deliver high-throughput capabilities.

The role emphasizes cloud-native stacks, distributed processing, and mentoring across engineering levels, with a strong focus on latency optimization and resource efficiency.