Senior Staff Engineer, Automation, Performance & Validation

Jobs Paloaltonetworks; United States; Hybrid; USD 126,000 - 205,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to build automation frameworks, performance tooling, and enterprise validation infrastructure for secure, scalable software. You will write production-quality code daily, focusing on backend services, distributed systems, and enterprise infrastructure to enable teams to deliver reliable software.

You will collaborate with Development, DevOps, and Security Engineering to ensure scalable, observable systems, with hybrid work in Santa

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering or related discipline.
• Experience developing production-quality software in Python/Java/Go and building libraries, APIs, or tooling.
• Experience designing automation and testing frameworks for backend services and distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, REST APIs, and modern architectures.
• Hands-on PKI, X.509 certificates, TLS, certificate lifecycle management.
• Strong networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/S, TLS, certificate-based auth.
• Experience with Linux and Windows environments.
• Hands-on containerization with Docker and Kubernetes.
• CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, or similar.
• Experience building automation for performance, scalability, or enterprise validation.
• Strong debugging and root-cause analysis across software, infra, networking, cloud, and distributed apps.
• Ability to lead technically complex initiatives and mentor engineers.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain automation frameworks for backend services, distributed systems, and cloud-native apps.
• Build software to provision and manage enterprise-scale validation environments.
• Develop automation that validates functionality, scalability, resiliency, performance, security, and operability.
• Simulate complex customer environments spanning Linux, Windows, networking, PKI, Kubernetes, cloud infra, and distributed architectures.
• Collaborate with Development, DevOps, and Security teams to ensure scalability, reliability, observability, and testability.
• Enhance CI/CD pipelines and tooling to improve developer productivity and release confidence.
• Analyze and debug complex issues across software, infrastructure, networking, cloud services, and distributed apps.
• Participate in architecture design, technical discussions, and code reviews; mentor engineers.

Skills

Python

Java

Go

REST APIs

Distributed systems

PKI

TLS

Linux

Windows

CI/CD

GitHub Actions

Jenkins

GitLab CI

Debugging

Mentoring

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to build automation frameworks, performance tooling, and enterprise validation infrastructure for secure, scalable software. You will write production-quality code daily, focusing on backend services, distributed systems, and enterprise infrastructure to enable teams to deliver reliable software.

You will collaborate with Development, DevOps, and Security Engineering to ensure scalable, observable systems, with hybrid work in Santa