Senior Principal Forward-Deployed AI Engineer (Customer)

Palo Alto Networks; Plano (TX); On-site; USD 184,000 - 297,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer for AI Gateway to join our team in Plano, TX. You will embed with customer engineering teams, write production code, design low-latency topologies, and build plugins to ship secure enterprise AI workloads.

You will bridge customer environments and the core AI Gateway engine, lead architecture discussions, and help deploy across multi-cloud platforms while solving real-time outages and performance challenges.

Qualifications

• 7+ years writing production code (Python, Go, TS/C++), with APIs (gRPC, REST, WebSockets) and gateways.
• LLM orchestration, prompt security, token optimization, routing, and vector databases/RAG.
• Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, AWS/GCP/Azure, OIDC/OAuth2, and zero-trust networking.

Responsibilities

• Write production-grade code to integrate AI Gateway with microservices and multi-clouds.
• Build custom middleware/plugins for identity-aware policies and telemetry pipelines.
• Develop automated deployment modules (Terraform, Helm, Kubernetes) and SDK wrappers.
• Optimize high-throughput, low-latency traffic paths and zero-trust deployments.
• Lead Architectural Design Reviews with customer engineers and CISOs.

Skills

Python

Go

TypeScript

C++

APIs

gRPC

WebSockets

Envoy

Kong

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

AWS

GCP

Azure

OIDC

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer for AI Gateway to join our team in Plano, TX. You will embed with customer engineering teams, write production code, design low-latency topologies, and build plugins to ship secure enterprise AI workloads.

You will bridge customer environments and the core AI Gateway engine, lead architecture discussions, and help deploy across multi-cloud platforms while solving real-time outages and performance challenges.