Senior Principal Backend Architect, AI-Driven Systems

Palo Alto Networks, Inc.

Santa Clara (CA)

On-site

USD 184,000 - 297,000

Full time

14 days+

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Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Sr Principal Software Engineer for the ADEM group in Santa Clara. You will serve as a primary architect and technical visionary for the backend data plane and control plane, shaping the infrastructure for SASE observability and scalable endpoints.

In this high-impact role, you will mentor senior engineers, define the technical roadmap, collaborate with Product, Data Science, and DevOps, and lead architectural improvements while solving complex distributed systems

Qualifications

12+ years of software engineering experience with large-scale distributed systems.
Expertise in AI-augmented development tools to accelerate SDLC.
Architecting systems handling billions of events per day with sub-second latency.
Deep knowledge of GCP (GKE, Spanner, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Dataflow) and FinOps.
Data pipelines via Kafka, Pulsar, or Flink.
Security, Zero Trust, L4-L7 networking, encryption standards.
Open source contributions or speaking at conferences desirable.
BS/MS/PhD in CS or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

Define long-term architectural vision for ADEM backend services.
Lead Design Review Board for secure, high-availability, cost-efficient patterns.
Drive AI workflows and backend orchestration for LLM-powered remediation.
Collaborate with Product, Data Science, and DevOps to translate requirements.
Mentor Staff and Senior engineers, promote code quality and technical debt management.
Own crisis leadership and post-mortems to drive architectural improvements.