Principal Software Escalation Engineer

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.

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.

• This role can be filled anywhere in the United States*

We’re looking for a Principal Escalation Engineer to serve as a key architect of customer stability and product maturity within the Jupiter Group. This is a high-impact, cross-functional leadership role that sits at the intersection of R&D, Product, and Customer Success. You will not just resolve issues, you will fundamentally shape how our products are designed, built, and delivered. You will act as the "Voice of the Customer" within the engineering lifecycle, influencing architectural decisions to ensure our solutions are not only robust but also intuitive to deploy and manage.

By treating supportability and onboarding as core product features, you will protect R&D capacity, accelerate delivery, and ensure our innovations succeed in the real world.

• Voice of the Customer in Design (Shift Left):
  Join discovery and design sessions to validate proposed features against real-world customer use cases. You will provide critical feedback on design and UX before development begins, flagging if a feature will be difficult to implement, fails to address specific edge cases, or introduces friction that hinders adoption.
• Define Holistic Product & Supportability Requirements:
  Go beyond standard logging; define the capabilities needed to streamline the entire customer journey. This includes specifying requirements for smoother product onboarding, self-service troubleshooting tools, and connectivity checks (e.g., demanding a prerequisite script for connector installation or built-in latency monitoring between components).
• Own the R&D Escalation Strategy:
  Act as the single accountable authority for technical escalations, replacing reactive "ping-pong" with a structured, predictive pipeline that restores delivery predictability to the sprint teams.
• Drive Operational Excellence:
  Transform how we monitor and maintain health by owning the logic behind Pager Duty alerts, reducing noise, and defining the "Definition of Ready" for operational handoffs.
• Empower the Support Organization:
  Act as a force multiplier by leading high-level training and knowledge transfer, enabling Support to resolve complex issues independently and lowering the escalation rate.
• Lead Incident Lifecycle & CAPA:
  Drive the post-incident process, ensuring that every failure results in a systemic improvement, whether it’s a code fix, a documentation update, or a process change.
• Influence the
  
  Roadmap:
  
  Use data from the field (trends, escaped bugs, and friction points)…