Senior Forward-Deployed AI Security Engineer

Palo Alto Networks; North Carolina; Remote; USD 249,000 - 341,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Distinguished Forward Deployed Engineer for Prisma AIRS to serve as the technical authority within strategic enterprise teams. You will architect, build, and deploy secure AI workloads, write high-performance code, and define deployment standards that scale across global environments.

You will lead multi-disciplinary collaboration, drive architectural patterns into product capabilities, and contribute to enterprise reference architectures and security standards in

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software development and distributed systems architecture experience.
• Master’s degree or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, or equivalent practical experience.
• Master-level proficiency in Python, Go, or C++, with asynchronous programming and high-concurrency systems.
• Extensive background designing and operating API gateways (Envoy, Kong) and enterprise protocols (gRPC, REST).
• Expert-level knowledge of LLM orchestration, vector databases, runtime guardrails, and prompt injection mitigation.
• Advanced mastery of containerization, custom Kubernetes operators, service meshes, and IaC across major cloud providers.
• Comprehensive knowledge of enterprise security protocols, data loss prevention, and network segmentation.

Responsibilities

• Lead Architectural Design Reviews to build zero-trust, high-availability AI safety topologies across enterprise environments.
• Write production-grade code (Python, Go, C++) integrating Prisma AIRS into enterprise microservices and AI infrastructure.
• Build high-throughput middleware and proxy extensions for real-time prompt security and identity-aware access controls.
• Architect automated IaC deployment modules and SDK wrappers to accelerate rapid enterprise product adoption.
• Optimize low-latency traffic paths for streaming LLM payloads, intelligent caching, and global load balancing.
• Serve as the ultimate tier-4 escalation point for mission-critical production outages and complex distributed systems.
• Analyze telemetry pipelines to resolve edge-case failures across agentic frameworks like LangChain and LlamaIndex.
• Upstream custom plugins, platform optimizations, and core engine enhancements to primary Prisma AIRS repositories.
• Partner with cross-functional leadership to convert recurring enterprise architectural patterns into native product capabilities.
• Author enterprise reference architectures and whitepapers to establish industry standards for AI security and compliance.

Skills

Python

Go

C++

Asynchronous programming

High-concurrency systems

Education

Master’s degree or Ph.D. in Computer Science, AI, Cybersecurity

Tools

Envoy

Kong

gRPC

REST

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Grafana

Datadog

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Distinguished Forward Deployed Engineer for Prisma AIRS to serve as the technical authority within strategic enterprise teams. You will architect, build, and deploy secure AI workloads, write high-performance code, and define deployment standards that scale across global environments.

You will lead multi-disciplinary collaboration, drive architectural patterns into product capabilities, and contribute to enterprise reference architectures and security standards in