Senior Staff Escalation Engineer

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!

This role is remote, but distance is no barrier to impact. Our hybrid teams collaborate across geographies to solve big problems, stay close to our customers, and grow together. You will be part of a culture that values trust, accountability, and shared success where your work truly matters.

Join the engineering team responsible for ensuring the reliability, availability, and operational excellence of the Idira Identity Security Management platform (formerly Cyber Ark), supporting Identity Security Administration (ISA), Secure Infrastructure Access (SIA), Privilege Cloud (pCloud), and Tenant Management (TM).

As a Senior Staff Escalation Engineer
, you will investigate the platform's most complex production issues, partnering directly with global R&D teams to identify root causes, drive product improvements, and enhance platform reliability. You will own technical investigations from initial escalation through engineering resolution, collaborating closely with software engineers to diagnose software defects, improve product quality, and strengthen platform resiliency.

This is a hands-on software engineering role - not a traditional support position. Success requires the ability to think like a software engineer while approaching production issues with the curiosity of an investigator. As the engineering escalation point between Technical Support and global R&D, you will help resolve the platform's most technically challenging production issues while influencing product quality, improving operational processes, and helping Engineering build more reliable cloud services.

• Serve as the highest level of engineering escalation for complex production issues across Identity Security Administration (ISA), Secure Infrastructure Access (SIA), Privilege Cloud, and Tenant Management (TM).
• Own production investigations from initial escalation through root cause identification and engineering resolution.
• Reproduce complex production issues and analyze logs, metrics, traces, telemetry, APIs, source code, and system behavior to isolate root causes.
• Partner directly with global R&D teams to diagnose software defects, validate findings, and drive timely product fixes.
• Translate investigation findings into actionable engineering defects with clear reproduction steps, log analysis, and supporting evidence.
• Differentiate among software defects, configuration issues, infrastructure problems, and environmental conditions to ensure accurate ownership.
• Serve as a technical leader during major production incidents, driving cross-functional collaboration to restore platform stability and prevent recurrence.
• Collaborate closely with Engineering, Product Management, Cloud Operations, and Technical Support to restore platform stability and prevent recurrence.
• Develop troubleshooting tools, automation, diagnostics, and technical documentation to improve investigation efficiency and operational excellence.
• Analyze recurring production issues to identify systemic trends and influence long-term product, architectural, and operational improvements.
• Mentor engineers and share technical expertise across Engineering, R&D, and Technical Support organizations.
• Participate in an on-call rotation supporting…