Senior Principal Backend Engineer, Cortex Platform

Palo Alto Networks; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 277,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Senior Principal Backend Engineer for the Cortex group to lead backend development across Cortex XSOAR, XDR, and XSIAM. You will focus on the Cortex Platform and contribute to shared infrastructures, delivering value to thousands of customers with a can-do attitude.

You will mentor teams, design scalable data models, and drive robust APIs using Python, Flask, and Go in a cloud-native environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in CS/CE or related field.
• 14+ years of professional software engineering experience in distributed, cloud-native development.
• Expert-level programming in Python, Go, or Java with large-scale distributed systems experience.
• Extensive cloud development with REST APIs, databases, serverless, and microservices architectures.
• Hands-on technical lead or architect on complex software projects.

Responsibilities

• Serve as an acknowledged technical leader, collaborating across engineering teams to ensure alignment.
• Drive full lifecycle of projects from requirements to design and implementation, acting as a lead or mentor.
• Align planned work with product management, UX design, and engineering stakeholders.
• Identify and mitigate risks to ensure smooth execution and high-quality output.
• Design and optimize scalable data models and queries using MySQL/BigQuery for performance.
• Develop backend logic and API endpoints using Python/Flask and Go-based services.
• Mentor engineers and foster a culture of technical excellence.

Skills

Python

Go

Java

Distributed systems

Cloud development

REST APIs

Leadership

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in CS/CE or related field

Tools

ElasticSearch

Google Pub/Sub

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Senior Principal Backend Engineer for the Cortex group to lead backend development across Cortex XSOAR, XDR, and XSIAM. You will focus on the Cortex Platform and contribute to shared infrastructures, delivering value to thousands of customers with a can-do attitude.

You will mentor teams, design scalable data models, and drive robust APIs using Python, Flask, and Go in a cloud-native environment.