Senior Principal Backend Engineer – Cortex Platform Lead

Palo Alto Networks; California (MO); Hybrid; USD 184,000 - 297,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Senior Principal Backend Engineer to lead backend development for Cortex products (XSOAR, XDR, XSIAM). You will tackle complex security challenges and help scale the Cortex platform to thousands of customers.

The role focuses on building core data pipelines, analytics, and APIs, with a bias for architectural leadership and hands-on coding in Python, Go, and Java.

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.
• Expert-level programming skills in Python, Go, or Java, with proven experience building 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 a technical leader, collaborating across engineering teams to ensure alignment.
• Drive end-to-end project lifecycle from requirements to design and implementation.
• Lead alignment across product management, UX design, and engineering stakeholders.
• Design and optimize scalable data models and queries using MySQL and BigQuery.
• Develop robust business logic and API endpoints using Python and Flask, and build high-performance backend services using Go.

Skills

Python

Go

Java

Distributed systems

Cloud development

REST APIs

Databases

Microservices

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 to lead backend development for Cortex products (XSOAR, XDR, XSIAM). You will tackle complex security challenges and help scale the Cortex platform to thousands of customers.

The role focuses on building core data pipelines, analytics, and APIs, with a bias for architectural leadership and hands-on coding in Python, Go, and Java.