Sr. Principal Software Engineer - Backend, Identity & Access Management (Chronosphere)

Palo Alto Networks; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-friendly

Competitive compensation

Employee benefits

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a senior Identity & Access Management platform engineer to spearhead architecture and delivery of our IAM stack. You will design granular access control, drive reliability, and mentor engineers across teams, aligning roadmaps with customer needs with product managers.

You will work hands-on with Go, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP) to build scalable, secure services while reducing toil and ensuring audits and compliance are baked into the platform.

Qualifications

• Experience building large-scale distributed systems and assessing reliability, security, cost, and time-to-market trade-offs.
• Proven track record turning ideas into production-ready platform capabilities.
• Ability to partner with product managers to align customer needs with technical roadmaps.
• Strong communication skills to frame complex trade-offs for engineers, PMs, and leadership.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and evolution of our granular access control framework and platform APIs.
• Drive cross-team initiatives, negotiating priorities and dependencies without direct authority.
• Ship and maintain IAM platform capabilities using Go, Kubernetes, and cloud deployments (AWS/GCP).
• Own production reliability, monitor SLOs, and address security and reliability risks.
• Mentor engineers, interview and onboard, and help grow the team.

Skills

Access control

Go

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

Security

Platform engineering

IAM

Mentoring

Leadership

Tools

Go

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

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.

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! This role is remote, but distance is no barrier to impact. Our hybrid teams collaborate across geographies to solve big problems, stay close to our customers, and grow together. You will be part of a culture that values trust, accountability, and shared success where your work truly matters.

Job Summary

Chronosphere, a Palo Alto Networks company, is the observability platform built for control in the modern, containerized world. Chronosphere empowers customers to focus on the data and insights that matter by reducing complexity, optimizing costs, and remediating issues faster. Chronosphere reduces data volumes and associated costs by 84% on average while saving developers thousands of hours. Recognized as a leader by major analyst firms, Chronosphere is trusted by the world's most innovative brands, including DoorDash, affirm, and Zillow.

The Team

The Identity & Access Management team owns our authentication and access control platform: the APIs, libraries, services, and data stores other engineering teams integrate with to control who can do what in their part of the product. Other teams write the access rules for their own features. This team builds the system they plug into. We are increasing our investment in this area, and the team is growing rapidly. These systems sit in front of every dashboard, API, and piece of customer data, so reliability and security posture come first. Much of our roadmap is customer-driven too: access control granularity, SSO and SCIM coverage, and service account scoping come up during procurement and renewal. We are seeking a senior technical leader for this platform. You will set the architectural direction, lead the most complex and highest stakes work, stay hands-on with the code, and mentor other engineers on the team.

Qualifications

• Lead and evolve the design of our granular access control framework: a sophisticated, scalable, and reliable system that nearly every other product team integrates with. Set the architectural direction for the platform on a 1-3 year horizon, including APIs for other teams, shippable iterations, build-versus-buy decisions, how we manage technical debt, and how to scale reliably.
• Lead initiatives that span teams. Much of this work lands in code other teams own, so negotiating priorities, resolving dependencies, and influencing peers without authority matter alongside technical skills.
• Ship and maintain platform capabilities in Go, deployed on Kubernetes across cloud platforms such as AWS and GCP. This is a hands‑on role, and you will take on the parts of the system that are the most complex and most frequently used.
• Own the reliability of these systems in production. Monitor SLOs and take timely action to meet our reliability goals. Identify security and reliability risks, and build systems to address and mitigate them.
• Eliminate systemic failure modes and toil through architectural, deployment, and tooling improvements to keep this platform safe to change.
• Partner with your product manager to assess customer needs and co‑create the roadmap. Your PM owns direction. You ground it in what is buildable. Both of you bring empathy for the admins who live in these systems every day, so you can tell which access control gaps are genuinely blocking customers.
• Balance large investments alongside a steady cadence of customer requests while making sure the team can deliver at a predictable pace.
• Partner with the teams who will build on what you ship. Build relationships and engage them early and often to stay connected to our needs in the organization.
• Work with our security and compliance partners on reviews, audits, and realistic commitments we make to customers.
• Track where identity and access management is heading outside the company, including new security models and the access control questions AI agents raise, and turn that into technical bets we can act on.
• Mentor engineers on this team and elsewhere in the organization. Help us grow the team by interviewing and onboarding new engineers into a challenging domain.

Required Qualifications

• A track record of taking an ambitious vision from an idea to production.
• The ability to work through ambiguity collaboratively with customers and partners toward iterative execution.
• Experience owning initiatives that span several teams from inception to delivery, working alongside product managers, designers, and other engineers.
• Experience with large scale distributed systems, and the judgment to weigh reliability, scalability, security, cost, and time‑to‑market trade‑offs.
• Strong product sense. You hold a technical and a product point of view at the same time. You can tell which gaps in a platform capability change what a customer is actually able to do, and you turn customer and contractual requirements into engineering priorities rather than waiting for them to be handed to you. You use data to make the case for architectural investment.
• Experience building platform capabilities that other engineering teams adopt, and driving adoption through collaboration and negotiation.
• Experience partnering and negotiating with infrastructure engineering teams, helping to align priorities, and building toward a shared technical vision.
• The technical depth to lead design reviews, assess risk in a design, understand critical code paths, and evaluate engineering trade‑offs directly.
• Familiarity with enterprise software and the expectations security‑conscious customers place on access control, authentication, and auditability.
• A background in platform engineering, ideally with exposure to identity, access control, or security‑adjacent infrastructure. Deep IAM specialization is a nice‑to‑have.
• The curiosity and motivation to learn a deep, complex domain, and the habit of seeking feedback on your own designs.
• Fluency in a system level language such as Go, C++, Java, C#, or Rust. Knowing a specific language isn’t important. What matters is that you have become fluent in one by spending a lot of time on the kinds of projects where these languages are used.
• The communication skills to frame complex trade‑offs for a range of audiences, from engineers on other teams to product managers to leadership.
• A flexible, collaborative working style, and a way of working with other teams that raises the technical bar without routing every decision through you.

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.

• /yr

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.