Senior Principal Backend Engineer — Global Internet Discovery

Palo Alto Networks; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 277,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer to lead the technical vision for the Cortex Xpanse Attack Surface Management team. You will architect scalable, distributed services and drive end-to-end delivery, partnering with engineering leadership to set the long-term roadmap.

You will build backend scanning systems in Go or Java, create data pipelines with Apache Beam, analyze sources for customer impact, mentor engineers, and help shape product strategy.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend systems.
• Track record of setting technical direction, leading architectural decisions, and delivering massive, scalable systems.
• Proficiency in Java or Golang; strong experience with other modern backend languages considered.

Responsibilities

• Build, optimize, and scale distributed backend scanning systems in Go.
• Design and develop robust data collection pipelines using Apache Beam and Java multithreading frameworks.
• Investigate new data sources and perform data analysis to estimate customer impact.
• Take ownership of projects, drive them to completion, and support them in production.
• Partner with engineering leadership, product managers, and downstream teams to define product strategy and enable the creation of new customer-facing features.
• Mentor and grow engineers, setting a high bar for technical excellence, architecture design, and system reliability.

Skills

Java

Golang

Distributed systems

Data pipelines

Backend design

Tools

Apache Beam

Kubernetes

Terraform

BigQuery

PostgreSQL

MySQL

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer to lead the technical vision for the Cortex Xpanse Attack Surface Management team. You will architect scalable, distributed services and drive end-to-end delivery, partnering with engineering leadership to set the long-term roadmap.

You will build backend scanning systems in Go or Java, create data pipelines with Apache Beam, analyze sources for customer impact, mentor engineers, and help shape product strategy.