Job Details

Revolutionizing protection.

Define what’s next in cybersecurity.

Senior Engineering Manager, Enterprise AI Products

Santa Clara, California, United States IT Ref ID: JR-019582

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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 Team

The Information Technology (IT) team at Palo Alto Networks is at the forefront of securing our own enterprise. We are a team of builders and innovators, responsible for the architecture, implementation, and maintenance of the systems and infrastructure that power our global operations. From network security to cloud applications, we ensure that our own employees have the secure, reliable, and cutting-edge tools they need to protect our digital way of life. Joining our IT team means you’ll be a critical part of our ‘customer zero’ story, using and securing our own products to solve complex challenges.

Job Summary

As the Senior Engineering Manager for the Enterprise AI Products Team, you will lead the end-to-end execution behind our next generation of internal and external AI-driven applications, intelligent agents, and automated solutions. This role is built for a sharp, deeply technical manager who rejects hands-off administration and thrives on staying close to the architecture, infrastructure, and code.

In this role, you will embody T-shaped leadership. Your vertical depth is rooted in elite technical expertise—AI engineering, Large Language Models (LLMs), and high-scale distributed systems. Your horizontal breadth is your capability to understand and speak the language of other disciplines across the enterprise, including Product Management, Sales, Marketing, Finance, HR, and Legal. You don't just manage engineering tasks; you connect disparate ideas, translate business needs into technical realities, and align cross-functional stakeholders to make better, faster product decisions. Most importantly, you are an agile leader who effectively modulates your depth—possessing the capability and willingness to make targeted individual contributions or go to any technical level when the situation demands.

Your Impact

Deep-Dive Technical Leadership: Maintain strong technical anchoring. You will actively engage in system design, perform rigorous code reviews, and dive straight into the trenches to pair-program, debug, or unblock critical production issues alongside your team.
T-Shaped Problem Solving & Alignment: Solve complex enterprise challenges by balancing your technical depth (the vertical) with a broad understanding of business functions like Marketing, Finance, and Sales (the horizontal). Connect technical capabilities with business goals to drive seamless alignment across non-technical teams.
0-to-1 Product Delivery: Lead a talent-dense team through the full lifecycle of production-grade AI applications, multi-modal systems, and agentic workflows. Translate complex, fast-moving business requirements into concrete technical roadmaps and hardened software foundations.
Building a "Pit of Success": Focus ruthlessly on developer velocity and systems thinking. Design internal tooling, automated evaluation pipelines, and guardrails that make it easy for other engineering and product teams to safely deploy AI features without needing to know every underlying infrastructure detail.
Operational Excellence & Toil Reduction: Instill high-rigor engineering practices, including automated model training, versioning, deployment, and monitoring. Drive automated testing strategies for drift detection, while building self-healing infrastructure to minimize operational toil.
Responsible AI & Governance: Partner with security, legal, and data governance teams to build privacy-preserving data interfaces, ensuring all AI products strictly adhere to compliance frameworks, data privacy laws, and secure AI deployment practices.

Qualifications

Your Experience

10+ years of experience in software engineering, distributed systems, or enterprise architecture, with at least 4+ years of direct engineering management experience overseeing high-performing technical teams.
Active Technical Roots: A proven track record as an individual contributor with active, hands-on fluency in programming languages such as Python, Go, or Java.
Production Generative AI & LLM Systems: Direct experience building, deploying, and scaling enterprise applications utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and multi-modal agent frameworks.
Infrastructure & MLOps Fluency: Deep familiarity with modern AI/ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow) and cloud ecosystems (AWS SageMaker, Google Vertex AI, Azure ML), alongside streaming data platforms, data lakes, and vector search indexing.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Proven ability to partner with and influence non-engineering functions (e.g., Product, Finance, Legal, HR) by understanding their core drivers and constraints.
Thriving in Ambiguity: Experience navigating highly fluid, rapid-growth technical environments where prioritizing "scale vs. pragmatic shipping" is a daily requirement.
Elite Communication: Exceptional ability to distill complex architectural bottlenecks into clear, actionable narratives for junior engineers up to VP and C-level executives.
Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.

Preferred Qualifications

Master’s degree or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical field.
Prior experience in a technical lead, technical consulting, or solutions architecture capacity, acting as a bridge between deep engineering groups and diverse business domains.
Deep understanding of cybersecurity principles specifically applied to guarding, monitoring, and deploying secure AI systems.
Experience contributing to open-source AI projects or a history of bringing cutting-edge research workflows into enterprise-grade products.

The Ideal Candidate

You are a rare hybrid: an empathetic, talent-multiplying leader who still gets a thrill from breaking down complex technical bottlenecks. You don't just manage from a dashboard; you lead from the front, challenge engineering assumptions, and possess the technical credibility to go head-to-head with a Principal Engineer. Because you are a T-shaped leader, you care deeply about your team's code quality, but you care equally about understanding the broader business context to ensure your team is building the right things. You are driven to make AI core to the fabric of our digital evolution.

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.

$223,000.00 - $306,500.00/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