Sr Principal Software Engineer/Architect (SRE/Platforms)

Palo Alto Networks, Inc.; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks in Santa Clara seeks a visionary Senior Principal Engineer/Architect to serve as the technical authority for global SRE and Platform Engineering initiatives. You will be the primary architect and driver of our AI-driven Autonomous SRE transformation across the US and India, translating complex requirements into automated, self-healing platform capabilities.

As a technical leader, you will audit bottlenecks, design scalable frameworks, and collaborate with product architectures

Qualifications

• Proven Technical Leadership overseeing large-scale platform projects.
• Experience designing and scaling distributed systems and cloud infrastructure.
• Strong practical experience with AI tooling, LLM integrations, or agentic workflows.
• Empathy for developers and ability to translate feedback into robust designs.
• Fluent in backend languages (Go, Python) and cloud-native tech.
• Collaborative, feedback-driven mindset with cross-functional partners.

Responsibilities

• Identify and architect end-to-end platform solutions across infrastructure and pipelines.
• Lead AI-powered innovation to reduce costs and automate triage of anomalies.
• Own scale and reliability, ensuring self-healing, observable systems in cloud environments.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to turn metrics into automated workflows.
• Design and maintain automated validation and immutable deployment practices.
• Mentor senior engineers and uphold high engineering standards.

Skills

Technical leadership

Distributed systems

AI tooling

Cloud infrastructure

Go/Python

Problem solving

Collaboration

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks®, we’re united by a shared mission—to protect our digital way of life. We thrive at the intersection of innovation and impact, solving real-world problems with cutting-edge technology and bold thinking. Here, everyone has a voice, and every idea counts. If you’re ready to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who are just as passionate as you are, you’re in the right place.

Who We Are

In order to be the cybersecurity partner of choice, we must trailblaze the path and shape the future of our industry. This is something our employees work at each day and is defined by our values: Disruption, Collaboration, Execution, Integrity, and Inclusion. We weave AI into the fabric of everything we do and use it to augment the impact every individual can have. If you are passionate about solving real-world problems and ideating beside the best and the brightest, we invite you to join us!

We believe collaboration thrives in person. That’s why most of our teams work from the office full time, with flexibility when it’s needed. This model supports real-time problem-solving, stronger relationships, and the kind of precision that drives great outcomes.

Job Summary

Your Career

We are looking for a visionary Senior Principal Engineer/Architect to serve as the technical authority for our global SRE and Platform Engineering initiatives across the US and India. This isn't just a "keep the lights on" role; you will be the primary architect and key technical driver of our AI-driven Autonomous SRE transformation at Palo Alto Networks. Acting as a strategic bridge between infrastructure products and operational excellence, you will partner directly with product architectures and engineering teams to translate complex requirements into automated, intelligent self-service platform capabilities, ensuring our global systems are not just reliable, but fully self-healing.

Your Impact

• Identify and Architect End-to-End Solutions: Actively audit and identify current systemic bottlenecks across all infrastructure processes, release pipelines, and core services offered by the Platform/SRE organization. Design and deliver complex architectural frameworks that eliminate operational friction and address team-wide pain points.

• Drive AI-Powered Innovation: Spearhead the integration of advanced AI tooling, LLMs, and agentic workflows into the SRE ecosystem. Build intelligent platform features that proactively optimize infrastructure costs, reduce cognitive load during high-pressure situations, and automate the triage of complex system anomalies.

• Lead Scale and Reliability Engineering: Take full ownership of projects from inception to delivery—acting as the ultimate technical authority—to ensure our distributed systems, binary/config deployment frameworks, and observability pipelines scale seamlessly across cloud-native environments.

• Collaborate Cross-Functional & Think Beyond Implementation: Work closely with cross-functional leaders, engineering teams, and internal stakeholders to turn unstructured system metrics and process inefficiencies into highly automated, intuitive platform workflows. Challenge legacy assumptions to elevate the overall developer experience.

• Share Infrastructure & Tooling Accountability: Partner with platform engineers across the organization to design, maintain, and revolutionize automated validation frameworks, immutable artifact deployment structures, and resilient self-healing infrastructure.

• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Foster a culture of accelerated learning, continuous growth, and high engineering standards. Mentor senior technical colleagues across the company in building reliable, highly performant, and intelligent platform systems through direct mentorship and design review leadership.

Qualifications

Your Experience

• Proven Technical Leadership: Exceptional ability to own large-scale platform projects from inception to production delivery, driving complex initiatives either independently or by rally-point leadership of cross-functional engineering teams.

• Expertise in Distributed Systems: Deep, battle-tested experience designing, debugging, and scaling highly complex distributed systems and cloud infrastructure (e.g., Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, or similar cloud-native tech stacks).

• AI Ecosystem Competency: Highly proficient with the modern AI tooling ecosystem. Practical experience applying AI, LLM integrations, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or agentic frameworks to solve real-world system engineering problems, automate observability, or streamline developer tooling.

• Relentless Problem-Solving & Empathy: A strong passion for identifying friction points, coupled with a deep empathy for internal software developers as your primary customers. The driving curiosity to constantly dissect and learn intricate, multi-layered domain areas.

• Feedback-Driven & Collaborative Mindset: A highly flexible, collaborative working style with a strong habit of actively seeking out feedback to refine technical designs, combined with the openness to communicate transparently and ask for help when navigating deeply complex architectural blocks.

• Language & Tooling Agility: Fluency in modern backend or infrastructure languages (such as Go, Python, or similar). Specific syntax matters less than a track record of spending significant time executing large-scale projects where these technologies are deployed.

#LI-TD1

Compensation Disclosure

The compensation offered for this position will depend on qualifications, experience, and work location. For candidates who receive an offer at the posted level, the starting base salary (for non-sales roles) or base salary + commission target (for sales/com-missioned roles) is expected to be the annual range listed below. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found here.

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Our Commitment

We’re trailblazers that dream big, take risks, and challenge cybersecurity’s status quo. It’s simple: we can’t accomplish our mission without diverse teams innovating, together.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for all qualified individuals with a disability. If you require assistance or accommodation due to a disability or special need, please contact us at [e-mail].

Palo Alto Networks is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity in our workplace, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or other legally protected characteristics.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Is role eligible for Immigration Sponsorship? No. Please note that we will not sponsor applicants for work visas for this position.