Senior Principal Platform Engineer — Tools & Cloud Infra

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

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks, Inc. is seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer to lead development of tools, platforms, and infrastructure enabling engineering excellence at scale.

This role combines deep software engineering expertise with strategic thinking and cross-team influence. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience building large-scale distributed systems, developer platforms, and cloud-native infrastructure while mentoring engineers and shaping technology direction across

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 9+ years of hands-on experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, networking, storage, and compute platforms.
• 9+ years of deep expertise with one or more major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud) and modern cloud-native architectures.
• 9+ years of extensive experience developing, deploying, and operating microservices on Kubernetes using modern cloud-native technologies.
• 7+ years of extensive hands-on programming skills in Python and/or Go.
• Demonstrated expertise in system architecture, scalability, reliability, performance optimization, security, observability, and operational excellence.
• 7+ years of Strong experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD automation, platform engineering, and developer productivity tooling.
• Expert knowledge of software quality practices, code health, testing strategies, performance analysis, diagnostics, debugging, and production support.

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, and highly available 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.

Skills

Python

Go

Kubernetes

Cloud platforms

CI/CD

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related

Tools

Terraform

Docker

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Palo Alto Networks, Inc. is seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer to lead development of tools, platforms, and infrastructure enabling engineering excellence at scale.

This role combines deep software engineering expertise with strategic thinking and cross-team influence. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience building large-scale distributed systems, developer platforms, and cloud-native infrastructure while mentoring engineers and shaping technology direction across