Principal Engineer Software; Prisma AIRS Core Services Backend

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.

Your Career With Prisma AIRS, Palo Alto Networks is building the world's most comprehensive AI security platform. Organizations are increasingly building complex ecosystems of AI models, applications, and agents, creating dynamic new attack surfaces with risks that traditional security approaches cannot address. In response, Prisma AIRS delivers model security, posture management, AI red teaming, and runtime protection. Our customers can confidently deploy AI‑driven innovation while ensuring a formidable security posture from development through runtime.

We are looking for a highly skilled and experienced Principal Software Engineer to join the Prisma AIRS shared services team, specifically focused on platform applications. In this role, you will play a crucial part in designing, developing, and optimizing robust, scalable, and high‑performance backend systems that power our cutting‑edge AI security platform, and you will set the technical direction that other engineers build on.

This role is located at our dynamic Santa Clara, CA HQ Campus and in office 3 days a week. This is not a remote role.

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, building and designing large distributed systems and web services in the cloud.
• Expertise in at least one strongly typed programming language (Go (preferred!), or Java, C#, C++) or modern Python (type hints, Pydantic, etc).
• Experience with a major cloud provider like GCP (preferred), AWS, or Azure.
• Hands‑on experience with SQL/No
  
  SQL based databases such as Postgres, MySQL, Spanner, Big Table, Big Query, MongoDB, etc.
• Experience with graph databases such as Neo4j is highly desired.
• Experience with a queuing system such as RabbitMQ or Kafka or Pub Sub.
• Experience with microservices architecture (Kubernetes, GKE, EKS, AKS, Docker, Serverless, etc).
• Experience writing comprehensive unit and end‑to‑end tests.
• Prior on‑call troubleshooting abilities. Isolate issues found during testing and verify bug fixes once they are resolved.
• Experience partnering with product managers and front end engineers.
• Experience in leading and doing big projects end to end.
• Self‑disciplined, self‑managed, self‑motivated, and strong sense of ownership, urgency, and drive.
• Excellent verbal and written communication and collaboration skills.

• Deep knowledge in at least one public cloud (GCP, AWS, or OCI).
• Experience with infra tools (docker, kubernetes, terraform), CI/CD pipelines (Git Lab or Git Hub), and observability tools such as Grafana.
• Experie…