Job Details

Revolutionizing protection.

Define what’s next in cybersecurity.

Distinguished Architect, Engineering Excellence

Santa Clara, California, United States IT Ref ID: JR-009365

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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

The Mission

We are looking for a visionary leader to architect our transformation from "AI-Assisted" to "AI-Native." You will not just select tools; you will fundamentally rewrite the social contract of our engineering culture.

Your mandate is to drive Engineering Excellence across the entire enterprise—bridging the gap between our critical brownfield systems (Sales, Finance, Legal, Support) and our high-velocity greenfield product innovations. You will implement a "Crawl, Walk, Run" strategy that elevates our developers from bricklayers to architects, orchestrating fleets of AI agents to deliver reliable, secure, and valuable software.

Who You Are

A Player-Coach: You are as comfortable refactoring a 10-year-old monolith in the Finance stack as you are prototyping with the latest Agentic workflows in Cursor.
A Master Communicator: You can explain the "Cone of Uncertainty" to a Junior Developer and the ROI of "Self-Healing Tests" to the CFO. You excel at evangelizing complex technical shifts to non-technical stakeholders across Marketing, Legal, and Customer Success.
A Legacy Modernization Specialist: You approach "Brownfield" challenges with an operational mindset. You view legacy code not as a burden, but as a critical asset to be optimized. You use modern AI tools to systematically reverse-engineer, document, and stabilize hidden business logic to ensure operational continuity.

Your Impact

1. Driving Strategy: The "Crawl, Walk, Run" Framework

Define the Vision: Move the organization from simple individual augmentation (e.g., GitHub Copilot) to systemic autonomy (Agentic workflows).
Governance & Safety: Establish "Human-on-the-Loop" protocols. You will define the liability frameworks and "circuit breakers" necessary to prevent AI agents from spiraling into infinite loops or security breaches.
Tooling Landscape: Curate the corporate toolkit, making high-stakes decisions between enterprise platforms and high-velocity disruptors based on privacy and capability.

2. Brownfield Modernization: Sales, Finance, Legal & Support

Legacy Analysis: Utilize AI agents to reverse-engineer and document our core business systems across the enterprise. You will implement tools to create "interactive documentation" that explains complex logic in Sales, Finance, Legal, and Customer Support workflows where original authors are no longer present.
Reimagine process at Scale: Lead initiatives to automate technical debt reduction, using AI to upgrade language versions and refactor synchronous code to asynchronous patterns without disrupting critical GTM, contract processing, or support ticket resolution flows.

3. Greenfield Acceleration: The "Blank Page" Solution

Automated Architecture: Implement "Diagram-as-Code" workflows where architecture diagrams are generated from natural language and stay synced with the code.
Rapid Prototyping: Empower product teams to move from "Text-to-UI" instantaneously, using generative design tools to validate ideas before a single line of production code is written.

4. Evangelism & Culture Transformation

Change Management: Drive the cultural shift required for AI adoption. You will host hackathons, internal "prompt engineering" workshops, and town halls to demystify AI for the broader organization.
Cross-Functional Bridge: Act as the translator between Engineering and Business functions (Marketing, Legal, HR). You will demonstrate how AI in the SDLC directly impacts time-to-market for their specific requirements.

Qualifications

Your Experience (Qualifications)

Experience: 15+ years in software engineering, with 7+ years in enterprise architecture. You have lived through the Waterfall-to-Agile shift and are ready to lead the Agile-to-Agentic shift.
Hands-On Proficiency: You must be capable of hands-on coding. You have experience with modern AI coding assistants and understand the difference between simple autocomplete and "Codebase Awareness".
Enterprise Breadth: Proven track record of working with Business Applications (ERP, CRM, HRIS, CLM, Support Ticketing). You understand the unique constraints of modifying systems that power Finance, Sales, Legal, and Support.
Technical Depth:
- Architecture: Deep understanding of Microservices, Event-Driven Architecture, and API Specification.
- DevOps/AIOps: Familiarity with modern observability and the concept of "Causal AI" for root cause analysis.
- Testing: Knowledge of "Self-Healing" automation and how to shift QA left.

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.

$243,000.00 - $335,000.00/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 accommodations@paloaltonetworks.com.

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?: Yes

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Current Employees, apply here