Senior Principal DevOps Architect & SRE Leader

Palo Alto Networks; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 178,000 - 287,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Sr Principal DevOps Engineer to support a large hybrid infrastructure as it runs on AWS and GCP. You will focus on automation, architecture, performance, metrics, troubleshooting, security, and reliability across services using Kubernetes, Terraform, GitLab, and GitOps tooling.

The role emphasizes leadership, platform-level engineering, and mentoring while maintaining a customer-focused, scalable, and secure environment.

Qualifications

• 12–15+ years in Infrastructure, SRE, DevOps, or Systems Engineering.
• 8–10+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems on AWS/GCP.
• Proven experience driving cross-team or org-level technical initiatives.
• Strong expertise in Terraform, Helm, or similar IaC frameworks.
• Deep experience in automation (Python, Go, shell scripting).
• Strong hands-on expertise in Kubernetes at scale.
• Advanced knowledge of Linux, networking, and distributed systems debugging.
• Experience with CI/CD (GitLab) and GitOps (ArgoCD).
• Strong background in observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, tracing).
• Ability to lead incident management and complex production troubleshooting.
• Excellent communication skills; ability to influence directors and VPs.
• Demonstrated leadership in mentoring and setting engineering standards.
• Strong ownership, with focus on scalability, reliability, and long-term architecture.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive org-level SRE and platform engineering strategy
• Architect multi-region, multi-cloud (GCP & AWS) highly available systems
• Establish SLO/SLI standards, error budgets, and reliability governance across teams
• Lead design of platform abstractions (Terraform modules, Kubernetes platforms, GitOps)
• Drive end-to-end observability architecture and reduce MTTR at scale
• Ensure services are production-ready, scalable, secure, and cost-optimized
• Lead SEV-1 incidents, RCA, and executive-level communication
• Influence product and engineering teams on architecture and reliability decisions
• Mentor senior engineers and act as a technical authority across orgs
• Drive automation, self-service platforms, and operational excellence

Skills

Cross-team leadership

Incident management

Engineering standards

Effective communication

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

Helm

GitLab

GitOps

ArgoCD

Python

Go

Prometheus

Grafana

Loki

Spinnaker

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Sr Principal DevOps Engineer to support a large hybrid infrastructure as it runs on AWS and GCP. You will focus on automation, architecture, performance, metrics, troubleshooting, security, and reliability across services using Kubernetes, Terraform, GitLab, and GitOps tooling.

The role emphasizes leadership, platform-level engineering, and mentoring while maintaining a customer-focused, scalable, and secure environment.