Principal Software Engineer; Cloud Application Development

Position: Principal Software Engineer (Cloud Application Development)
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

The Team

Engineering - Our engineering team is at the core of our products and connected directly to the mission of preventing cyberattacks. We are constantly innovating - challenging the way we, and the industry, think about cybersecurity. Our engineers don't shy away from building products to solve problems no one has pursued before. We define the industry instead of waiting for directions.

We need individuals who feel comfortable in ambiguity, excited by the prospect of a challenge, and empowered by the unknown risks facing our everyday lives that are only enabled by a secure digital environment.

Job Summary

As a Principal Software Engineer within the Engineering team, you will drive the technical leadership and end-to-end delivery of next-generation cloud security solutions. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to design, implement, and troubleshoot high-scale distributed systems, playing a pivotal role in shaping the future of our network security architecture.

This role offers the opportunity to innovate at the intersection of cloud technology and cybersecurity, delivering impactful security-as-a-service offerings that protect our digital way of life.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership for the end-to-end delivery of solutions, ensuring alignment with cross-functional product management and quality assurance teams.
• Design, implement, and troubleshoot robust next-generation cloud security solutions to address complex network security challenges.
• Drive the development of scalable cloud security architecture through hands-on coding and strategic architectural planning.
• Manage the full product development lifecycle, from definition and design through implementation, testing, and deployment.
• Collaborate proactively with Product Management, SRE, and Quality Engineering to deliver high-quality security-as-a-service offerings to market.
• Simplify complex technical issues to improve end-customer outcomes by working closely with customer support teams.
• Foster a culture of innovation, intellectual curiosity, and problem-solving within the engineering organization.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent field with 7+ years of relevant software engineering experience.
• Minimum of 5 years of hands-on programming experience in Go or Java, with additional proficiency in Python or C highly valued.
• Proven experience designing and developing high-performance, high-scale distributed software applications in a cloud environment.
• Strong technical proficiency with cloud technologies such as message queue (Kafka/Pub Sub/Redis), Data Storage (SQL/Bigtable/Redis/Mongo/Big Query).
• Demonstrated expertise in backend development, including REST APIs, databases, and serverless computing for distributed cloud applications.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with container orchestration platforms, specifically Docker and Kubernetes.
• Comprehensive understanding of public…