Senior Principal Software Engineer - Platform Tooling

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

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks seeks a Senior Principal Software Engineer to shape technology direction and mentor teams across multiple orgs. You will define architectural vision, set engineering standards, and drive initiatives to improve platform reliability and developer productivity.

The role focuses on large-scale, distributed systems, cloud-native infrastructure, and platform engineering, with a leadership stance across SRE, platform engineering, and R&D teams.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree 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 cloud providers experience (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud) and modern cloud-native architectures.
• 9+ years of experience developing, deploying, and operating microservices on Kubernetes.
• 7+ years of hands-on programming in Python and/or Go.
• Expertise in architecture, scalability, reliability, performance, security, observability, and operational excellence.
• 7+ years 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 for enterprise-scale operations.
• Write high-quality platform and infrastructure software while setting standards for maintainability, performance, security, and operational excellence.
• Lead design and implementation of highly complex, business-critical systems with organization-wide impact.
• Serve as the primary technical leader for large cross-functional initiatives and align teams on architecture and strategy.
• Lead architecture reviews and technical design discussions to ensure best practices and long-term principles.
• Establish standards, reusable frameworks, and reference architectures to improve software quality and developer productivity.
• Provide expert-level code reviews and mentorship across teams on design, testing, performance, security, and maintainability.
• Drive modernization via cloud-native tech, Kubernetes, distributed systems, observability, automation, and platform engineering.
• Lead incident response and complex production troubleshooting to enhance reliability and efficiency.
• Champion engineering excellence through CI/CD, automation, and developer experience improvements.
• Mentor and influence senior engineers while fostering growth and innovation across the organization.

Skills

Python

Go

Kubernetes

Cloud architecture

CI/CD automation

Developer productivity tooling

Distributed systems

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science / Electrical Engineering or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

Palo Alto Networks seeks a Senior Principal Software Engineer to shape technology direction and mentor teams across multiple orgs. You will define architectural vision, set engineering standards, and drive initiatives to improve platform reliability and developer productivity.

The role focuses on large-scale, distributed systems, cloud-native infrastructure, and platform engineering, with a leadership stance across SRE, platform engineering, and R&D teams.