Senior Principal Engineer – Distributed Systems Lead (Go/Java)

Jobs Paloaltonetworks; United States; On-site; USD 170,000 - 277,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks seeks a Senior Principal Software Engineer to lead the technical vision for the Cortex Xpanse ASM team, architecting scalable backend systems and data pipelines.

You will mentor engineers, partner with leadership, and drive end‑to‑end delivery of high‑impact initiatives across services, with focus on distributed systems and real‑time data processing.

This role operates in a collaborative, office‑driven culture with occasional flexibility for needs and growth opportunities.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend systems.
• A track record of setting technical direction, leading architectural decisions, and delivering massive, scalable systems into production.
• Proficiency in Java or Golang is preferred, though strong experience with other modern backend languages is welcome.
• Experience building data pipelines for real‑time streaming or batch processing.
• Experience with distributed systems, API design, and decoupling complex data architectures.
• Experience with at least one major cloud platform (GCP, AWS, or Azure).

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

Backend leadership

Java or Go

Data pipelines

Distributed systems

Cloud platforms

Job description

Palo Alto Networks seeks a Senior Principal Software Engineer to lead the technical vision for the Cortex Xpanse ASM team, architecting scalable backend systems and data pipelines.

You will mentor engineers, partner with leadership, and drive end‑to‑end delivery of high‑impact initiatives across services, with focus on distributed systems and real‑time data processing.

This role operates in a collaborative, office‑driven culture with occasional flexibility for needs and growth opportunities.