Principal Escalations Engineer; Customer Engineering, Network Security

Position: Principal Escalations Engineer (Customer Engineering, Network Security)
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 Customer Support
- Our Customer Support team is critical to our success and mission. As part of this team, you enable customer success by providing support to clients after they have purchased our products. Our dedication to our customers doesn’t stop once they sign — it evolves. As threats and technology change, we stay in step to accomplish our mission. You’ll be involved in implementing new products, transitioning from old products to new, and fixing integrations and critical issues as they are raised — in fact, you’ll seek them out to ensure our clients are safely supported.

We fix and identify technical problems with a pointed focus on providing the best customer support in the industry.

Job Summary Customer Engineering (CE) is an elite technical response team sitting at the intersection of Product Engineering, Systems Reliability, and Technical Support. As a Principal Escalations Engineer, you serve as the expert escalation point for an AI-driven support ecosystem, diagnosing defects and driving resolutions alongside AI tools. You will operate as a code-aware escalation point for novel and systemic issues, defining autonomous AI troubleshooting workflows that empower our wider support organization.

Ultimately, your work shapes features for supportability that define the future of our products and elevates our automation.

Key Responsibilities Drive top-tier technical escalations through deep technical analysis and defect diagnosis for customers in crisis.

Collaborate with Engineering on hotfixes and represent engineering during critical executive communications.

Identify product serviceability fixes and embed serviceability into early product design phases with QA teams.

Define autonomous AI troubleshooting workflows, function-calling schemas, and guardrails for customer co-pilots.

Author structured playbooks, guides, and tool definitions to empower human support engineers and AI agents.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications BS/MS or equivalent technical degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
7+ years of experience in technical support, systems engineering, or top-tier technical escalation roles at a cybersecurity or network security vendor.

Solid hands-on understanding of L1–L7 networking, routing, switching, IPSEC, PKI, and SSL technologies.

Strong debugging and infrastructure troubleshooting skills for network security equipment and cloud-based environments.

Proficient in packet capture (PCAP) analysis using Wireshark, tcpdump, or similar tools.

Abilit…