Senior Principal Platform Engineer — Tools & Cloud Infra

Palo Alto Networks

Santa Clara (CA)

On-site

USD 170,000 - 277,000

Full time

12 days ago

Application generator

Turn this role into an interview — a resume and cover letter built around what this employer wants.

Get past ATS filters

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer who combines software craftsmanship with leadership to build tools, platforms, and infrastructure enabling engineering excellence at scale. This is a highly influential technical leadership role for an engineer who blends deep software expertise with strategic thinking across teams.

The ideal candidate has extensive experience building large-scale distributed systems, developer platforms, and cloud-native infrastructure, serving

Qualifications

9+ years designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems.
Experience with cloud-native architectures and modern cloud providers.
Strong focus on reliability, performance, security, and operability.

Responsibilities

Define and drive the long-term technical vision and architecture for developer platforms, infrastructure, and engineering tooling across multiple organizations.
Architect, design, and implement resilient, secure, scalable infrastructure and platform solutions that support enterprise-scale engineering operations.
Write high-quality platform and infrastructure software while setting the engineering standard for maintainability, performance, security, and operational excellence.
Lead the design and implementation of highly complex, business-critical systems and platform capabilities with organization-wide impact.
Serve as the primary technical leader for large cross-functional initiatives, aligning engineering teams on architecture, technology strategy, and implementation approaches.
Lead architecture reviews and technical design discussions, driving consensus and ensuring adherence to engineering best practices and long-term architectural principles.
Establish engineering standards, reusable frameworks, and reference architectures that improve software quality, developer productivity, and platform consistency.
Provide expert-level code reviews and technical mentorship, raising the engineering bar across teams through guidance on design, testing, performance, security, and maintainability.
Drive modernization initiatives involving cloud-native technologies, Kubernetes, distributed systems, observability, automation, and platform engineering.
Lead incident response and complex production troubleshooting efforts, identifying systemic improvements that enhance platform reliability and operational efficiency.
Champion engineering excellence by continuously improving software delivery practices through CI/CD, infrastructure automation, and developer experience initiatives.
Mentor and influence Principal, Senior, and Staff Engineers while fostering technical growth, innovation, and a culture of engineering excellence across the organization.