Principal Engineer Software - Backend; Prisma AIRS

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 Joining the AIRS Team Palo Alto Networks is pioneering the world's most comprehensive AI security platform through Prisma AIRS—protecting complex ecosystems of AI models, applications, and agents from development through runtime. As part of this mission, we are building a brand-new initiative on the AIRS team focused on advancing state-of-the-art AI/ML infrastructure and high-performance, distributed backend systems. We are recruiting senior technical leaders to drive this architecture from the ground up across the following levels:
Sr. Staff Engineer | Principal Engineer | Sr. Principal Engineer

Note:

All roles are hybrid based on-site (3x/week) at our corporate Headquarters in Santa Clara, CA. As a Software Engineer, you will build the highly scalable, distributed cloud architectures that power our next-generation threat prevention ecosystem. You will develop the critical control plane and microservices that orchestrate our advanced AI models, manage security policies, and interface with our high-throughput data pipelines and inline engines.

Your work will directly enable our customers to seamlessly deploy and manage cutting-edge AI security solutions at global scale.

• Design, build, and maintain highly scalable, fault-tolerant backend services and APIs that serve as the backbone for our new security platform.
• Develop the robust control plane that orchestrates security policies, manages configurations, and coordinates deployments across distributed environments.
• Write clean, performant, and secure code, with a primary focus on Golang or Python, ensuring system reliability under massive scale.
• Architect and deploy microservices using container orchestration (Kubernetes) across Google Cloud Platform (GCP) infrastructure.
• Build robust integration layers bridging the gap between high-speed data planes, massive telemetry pipelines, and user-facing management consoles.
• Champion software engineering best practices, including rigorous automated testing, CI/CD pipeline development, and comprehensive system monitoring.

• Education & Experience:
  
  BS/MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience) with 8+ years of experience in software engineering, specifically focused on backend systems, platform architecture, or distributed cloud services.
• Programming & Tech Stack:
  Deep programming expertise in Golang (Go) or Python is required.
• Microservices & APIs:
  Proven track record of building and scaling RESTful…