Senior Principal Software Engineer; Foundational Platform

Position: Senior Principal Software Engineer (Foundational Platform)
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 At Palo Alto Networks everything starts and ends with our mission:
Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life. We are a company built on the foundation of challenging and disrupting the way things are done, and we are looking for innovators who are as committed to shaping the future of cybersecurity as we are.

Your Career:

Help build what is next.  Strata Cloud Manager (SCM) is a public cloud delivered management platform to manage all Palo Alto Networks Next generation network security solutions. It’s an easy-to-use, scalable and secure platform to operationalize complex deployments using the Palo Alto Networks network security portfolio. At the core of SCM are foundational capabilities powering the Shared Infrastructure ecosystem, including Identity & Access Management, API Gateway, and automated onboarding services.

Senior Principal Software Engineers are:

Technical experts that help accelerate adoption of the very best engineering practices, while maintaining knowledge on industry innovations, trends and practices.

Experts who deliver on critical business needs and are recognized across the company as go-to engineering resources on given domains.

Role models and mentors who exemplify the best of Palo Alto Networks culture

Leaders who can communicate cogently with hands-on engineers

Hands-on engineers that can code and build great products.

Responsibilities:

Architect & Evolve Platform Services:
Lead the end-to-end architectural strategy and design for high-scale platform domains, including IAM/RBAC, fine-grained authorization, licensing/entitlement lifecycle, device management, and workflow orchestration.

Hands-on System Engineering:
Design and build resilient, distributed microservices using Go, Node.js, Python, Google Cloud, and Temporal workflow orchestration.

Security & Zero-Trust Architecture:
Enforce zero-trust security patterns across global services, integrating mTLS service-to-service authentication, OAuth
2.0/OIDC, and fine-grained authorization models.

Technical Leadership & Strategy:
Partner closely with Product Management, SRE, QA, and customer-facing teams to deliver robust end-to-end cloud solutions in a fast-paced environment.

Core Framework & Standards Development:
Contribute to shared internal Go, Node, Python frameworks, core client SDKs, event-driven async patterns, and micro-frontend platform tooling.

Operational & Distributed Systems Excellence:
Drive reliability initiatives, scalability improvements, latency optimization, and root-cause…