Senior Principal Backend Architect — AI-Powered, Scalable

Jobs Paloaltonetworks; California (MO); On-site; USD 184,000 - 297,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Sr Principal Software Engineer to serve as the primary architect for the ADEM data plane and control plane. You will shape the technical roadmap and ensure the backend scales to hundreds of millions of endpoints and multi-petabyte telemetry.

This role requires deep cloud, distributed systems, and AI integration expertise, with a focus on secure, high-performance engineering. Collaboration with Product and DevOps is essential for driving execution.

Qualifications

• 12+ years in software engineering, with large-scale distributed systems in cloud-native environments.
• Expert in AI-augmented development using Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf and Copilot.
• Proven ability to design systems handling billions of events per day with sub-second latency.
• Deep GCP expertise (GKE, Spanner, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Dataflow) and FinOps-aware optimizations.
• Experience with data pipelines (Kafka, Pulsar, or Flink).
• Security and networking vision, Zero Trust and encryption standards.
• Open source contributions or conferences desirable.
• Education: BS/MS/PhD in CS or related field.

Responsibilities

• Define long-term architectural vision for ADEM backend services and scalability.
• Lead design review board ensuring security by design and high availability.
• Drive AI/ML integration and backend orchestration for LLM-driven remediation.
• Collaborate with Product, Data Science, and DevOps to translate requirements into robust specs.
• Mentor Staff and Senior engineers; promote code quality and debt management.
• Act as escalation point for production issues and drive post-mortems.

Skills

Rust

Go

Java

Python

GCP

Kubernetes

AI tools

Kafka

Security

Zero Trust

Education

BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science

Tools

Kafka

Pulsar

Flink

GitHub Copilot

Claude Code

Cursor

Windsurf

GKE

Spanner

BigQuery

Pub/Sub

Dataflow

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Sr Principal Software Engineer to serve as the primary architect for the ADEM data plane and control plane. You will shape the technical roadmap and ensure the backend scales to hundreds of millions of endpoints and multi-petabyte telemetry.

This role requires deep cloud, distributed systems, and AI integration expertise, with a focus on secure, high-performance engineering. Collaboration with Product and DevOps is essential for driving execution.