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Job Details

Revolutionizing protection.

Define what’s next in cybersecurity.

Sr Principal Software Engineer (Wildfire - Backend)

Santa Clara, California, United States Software Engineering Ref ID: JR-014327
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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

Career:

We are seeking a Sr Principal Software Engineer to develop, build, and maintain our cutting edge cloud based, security product Infrastructure, which operates at massive scale and helps protect customers against constantly evolving online threats and attacks. Bring your software engineering expertise and technical leadership to work on our cutting edge malware detection platform, WildFire. 

We want passionate engineers who love to design and code world-class security services on Cloud Providers. Engineers who bring new ideas in all facets of software development, individual contributors who want to expand their skill set, take ownership of their feature areas and who are driven to solve problems at every level.

Lead in the design, deployment and scaling of our architecture as we are tackling new challenges. Participate in the redesign of the architecture to introduce appropriate microservices to process high rates of sample submissions. Collaboration and teamwork are at the foundation of our culture and we need engineers who can communicate and work well with others towards achieving a common goal.

Sr Principal Engineers are:

  • Deep technical experts and thought leaders who use their knowledge of industry innovations, trends and practices to architect solutions to complex problems

  • Visionaries who deliver on critical business needs and are recognized across the company as go-to engineering resources on given domains

  • Role models and mentors who exemplify the best of Palo Alto Networks culture

  • Leaders who can communicate cogently with hands-on engineers as well as executives

  • Hands-on engineers that can code and build great products

Your Impact

  • Thought leadership in driving the technical roadmap and Hands-on participation in developing next generation architecture optimized for the scalable solutions

  • Conceptualize, Architect and develop highly efficient multi-cloud micro services and data pipelines to support 10x traffic increases

  • Keep the product updated with best-of-the-times technology in a fast-evolving environment

  • Work with DevOps and Technical Support teams to investigate and resolve critical customer defects

  • Recruit and Mentor new team members

Qualifications

  • 10+ years of hands-on experience in building large enterprise applications with 4+ years experience in technical leadership roles 

  • Hands on experience writing production high quality scalable code in Python/Golang , extensive experiences with writing asynchronous code in multi-threaded and multi-processes env

  • Strong knowledge of data structures, algorithms, operating systems, and distributed systems fundamentals.

  • Great design and architecture skills, turning an idea into a production grade design and own end to end development and releases

  • Strong knowledge of databases, storage, and distributed persistence technologies.

    • Hands on experience with databases like SQL/NoSQL and other modern databases is a plus

  • Experience with performance profiling, tuning and improvement

  • Good to have a cloud-native service development stack on GCP/AWS or other clouds.

  • Experience with building REST/grpc API services and queuing system such as pubsub, RabbitMQ or Kafka, 

  • Exposure to using configuration management tools such as argocd, Ansible and/or Terraform

  • Strong problem solving and troubleshooting skills

  • BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering / Computer science or equivalent

  • A plus would be to have 2-3 years of experience in this role

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.

$170,000.00 - $277,000.00/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

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