Senior Principal Backend Architect, Cybersecurity Platform

Palo Alto Networks; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 184,000 - 297,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Senior Principal Backend Engineer to lead backend development for the Cortex platform, including XSOAR, XDR, and XSIAM. You will influence data pipelines, analytics, and APIs while driving scalable architectures that serve thousands of customers.

You will mentor teams, design robust services in Python/Go, and collaborate with product, UX, and engineers to deliver high-impact security solutions with excellence.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 14+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a focus on distributed, cloud-native application development.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, featuring deep expertise in Python, Go, or Java and a proven track record of architecting large-scale distributed systems.
• Extensive experience with cloud development, including REST APIs, databases, serverless computing, and microservices architectures.
• Demonstrated experience as a hands-on technical lead or architect on complex software projects.

Responsibilities

• Serve as an acknowledged technical leader, providing consultation and proactively collaborating across engineering teams to ensure alignment.
• Drive the full lifecycle of projects from requirements gathering to final design and implementation, acting as a project lead or mentor.
• Lead the alignment of planned work across the product by partnering with product management, UX design, and engineering stakeholders.
• Utilize a big-picture perspective to identify, analyze, and provide practical solutions for complex existing and impending technical problems.
• Design, build, and optimize highly scalable data models and queries using technologies such as MySQL and BigQuery, focusing on the details to ensure performance.
• Develop robust business logic and API endpoints using Python and Flask, and build high-performance backend services using Go.
• Proactively identify, articulate, and mitigate risks in projects to ensure smooth execution and high-quality output.
• Mentor and empower other engineers across the department, fostering a culture of technical excellence and applied learning.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud-native development

Python

Go

Java

APIs

SQL databases

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/CE

Tools

ElasticSearch

Google Pub/Sub

BigQuery

Kubernetes

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Senior Principal Backend Engineer to lead backend development for the Cortex platform, including XSOAR, XDR, and XSIAM. You will influence data pipelines, analytics, and APIs while driving scalable architectures that serve thousands of customers.

You will mentor teams, design robust services in Python/Go, and collaborate with product, UX, and engineers to deliver high-impact security solutions with excellence.