Principal Engineer - Platform 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.

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.

As a Platform Engineer on our newly forming team, you will design, build, and maintain the secure, highly available, and scalable infrastructure that powers our next-generation threat prevention platforms. You will manage our orchestration plane and automate the deployment pipelines that keep our inline engines, data pipelines, and AI models running at peak performance globally. Your work is the bedrock of our system's reliability, enabling engineering teams to deliver cutting-edge security products at scale.

• Architect, configure, and maintain high-scale Kubernetes clusters on Google Cloud Platform, optimizing for performance, resource utilization, and secure network isolation.
• Deploy, scale, and optimize core GCP managed data services, specifically Bigtable (for low-latency streaming telemetry) and Big Query (for large-scale data analytics).
• Design and implement robust Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) solutions to manage global multi-region environments deterministically.
• Build and support robust CI/CD deployment pipelines, automated validation gates, and version pinning configurations for our platform microservices.
• Partner with Data Plane and Data Pipeline engineers to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize resource bounds, ensuring sub-millisecond data processing stability.
• Drive site reliability engineering (SRE) practices, establishing observability dashboards, metrics collection, and proactive alerting frameworks.

• Education & Experience:
  
  BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience) with 5+ years of professional experience in Dev Ops, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or Cloud Platform Engineering.
• Orchestration & Containers:
  Deep, hands-on expertise with Kubernetes (GKE), container runtime environments, and service mesh architectures.
• Git Ops & CI/CD Pipelines:
  Extensive production experience with ArgoCD for continuous delivery and Git Lab CI/CD for automating complex software delivery pipelines.
• Infrastructure-as-Code:
  Proven proficiency in managing production cloud infrastructure using Terraform or similar IaC tools.

• GCP Data Infrastructure:
  Direct experience administering and performance-tuning GCP Bigtable (BT) and GCP Big Query (BQ) in high-throughput environments.
• Systems Programming & Scripting:
  Strong programming skills in Python, Go, or Bash to automate infrastructure tasks and develop platform tooling.
• Monitoring & Observability:
  Experience…