Principal Engineer, Internet Scanning & Security Research - Cortex Xpanse, Collections

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.

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.

The Collections team is the foundational engine behind the Cortex Xpanse Attack Surface Management (ASM) platform. We architect, scale, and orchestrate global internet‑scale discovery and scanning infrastructure. In this role, you will design distributed systems that continuously map the entire IPv4 and IPv6 internet, while building high‑throughput data pipelines to create the foundation for Xpanse’s Attack Surface Management. This role is unique: you will bridge the gap between high‑end security research and production‑grade engineering.

We need someone who brings deep cybersecurity expertise: understanding vulnerabilities and protocols, and can channel that knowledge into building the scanning systems, detection logic, and data pipelines that power Xpanse ’ll explore emerging scanning techniques, research new vulnerabilities, and prototype detection tools, then harden them into production systems that process petabytes of scan data weekly.

• Build and evolve high-performance network scanners that probe the internet at scale
• Design and maintain the layer that defines how each protocol is scanned
• Develop large-scale data processing pipelines that enable security analysis
• Investigate new data sources and perform data analysis to estimate customer impact
• Take ownership of projects, drive them to completion, and support them in production
• Mentor and grow engineers, share best practices, and technical expertise with a multidisciplinary team

• 7+ years building production backend systems, with meaningful exposure to security research or internet measurement
• Strong in at least one of:
  Go, Rust, Python, Java
• Practical knowledge of network protocols—experience building software that operates at the protocol level across TCP, UDP, TLS, HTTP, DNS, and beyond
• Proficiency with large-scale data analysis—SQL fluency, comfort with petabyte-scale datasets, ability to write complex analytical queries
• Track record of owning complex technical projects from design through production
• Hands‑on experience with cloud-native architectures (GCP, AWS, or Azure)

• Have expertise with any of the following: GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, Big Query, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Big Table, Apache Beam.
• Contributions to open-source scanning tools or published security research

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.

$ - $/yr

We’re trailblazers that dream big, take risks, and challenge cybersecurity’s status quo. It’s simple: we…