Senior Forward-Deployed AI Security Engineer (Remote)

Palo Alto Networks; Raleigh (NC); Remote; USD 249,000 - 341,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Distinguished Forward Deployed Engineer for Prisma AIRS. You will be the principal technical authority embedded within strategic enterprise teams, designing secure AI workloads and scalable deployments.

You’ll write high-performance code, define deployment standards, and link enterprise environments to the core product roadmap. You will lead zero-trust and distributed-system projects, collaborate with executives, and drive engineering designs across multiple cloud

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 expertise in 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 infrastructure-as-code across major cloud providers.
• Comprehensive knowledge of enterprise security protocols, data loss prevention, and network segmentation frameworks.
• Proven ability to build consensus and partner with executive leadership to translate mandates into engineering designs.
• Hands-on builder mindset, comfortable presenting to executives and debugging live production incidents.

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

Distributed systems

Python

Go

C++

Asynchronous programming

API gateways

Education

Master’s or Ph.D. in CS/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. You will be the principal technical authority embedded within strategic enterprise teams, designing secure AI workloads and scalable deployments.

You’ll write high-performance code, define deployment standards, and link enterprise environments to the core product roadmap. You will lead zero-trust and distributed-system projects, collaborate with executives, and drive engineering designs across multiple cloud