Senior Principal Software Engineer - Cortex

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks® everything starts and ends with our mission:

Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.
Our vision is a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. We are a company built on the foundation of challenging and disrupting the way things are done, and we’re looking for innovators who are as committed to shaping the future of cybersecurity as we are.

Who We Are

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

As a Senior Principal Software Engineer for Cortex Cloud, you will be instrumental in revolutionizing cybersecurity. You will lead the architecture and enforce high technical standards for critical Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) components. This role is key to advancing our mission of becoming the #1 Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) solution and shaping the future of cloud security.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end development lifecycle for Prisma Cloud backend features, from requirements gathering and design to deployment and production support.
• Proactively collaborate with cross-functional teams to design, shape, and integrate solutions across the product suite, ensuring alignment on technical direction.
• Drive technical excellence by actively participating in and leading code reviews, design reviews, and architectural decision-making processes.
• Maintain a production-first mindset, providing real-time mitigation and rapid solutions for production issues to ensure platform stability and reliability.
• Lead by example to foster a results-oriented culture, driving execution with a focus on quality, speed, and meticulous attention to detail.
• Define and enforce high architectural and technical standards across a growing engineering team, mentoring others to build a highly functional software development organization.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including scalable server-side application development.
• Extensive hands-on programming experience with Java and Python.
• Demonstrated experience building and deploying applications on major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Proven experience with microservices architecture and containerization technologies (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker, GKE, EKS).
• Experience designing and working with big-data architectures using technologies like Kafka, Splunk, or Flink.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with the Go programming language.
• Deep understanding of advanced computer science fundamentals, including lock-free data structures, bloom filters, and consistent hashing.
• Familiarity with modern CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Experience in cybersecurity, information security, or software security domains.

The Team

Cortex Platform - Cortex is the industry's only open and integrated, AI-based, continuous security platform. Cortex is a significant evolution of the Application Framework designed to simplify security operations and considerably improve outcomes. Deployed on a global, scalable public cloud platform, Cortex allows security operations teams to speed the analysis of massive data sets.

Our Commitment

We’re problem solvers that 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  [email protected].

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.