Sr Principal DevOps Engineer; AIOps) Santa Clara, California,

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.

Palo Alto Networks runs a large hybrid infrastructure and is one of the largest GCP customers. As a Sr Principal Dev Ops Engineer, you will be part of a team supporting the services running on this infrastructure. This includes automation, architecture, performance, metrics, troubleshooting, security, and reliability.

Our stack includes Kubernetes, Docker, GCP, AWS, Ansible, Terraform, Vault, Gitlab, Spinnaker, Tensorflow, Datadog, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Hadoop, MySQL, Percona, MongoDB, Python, and Go. We don’t expect you to know all these, but we do expect you to learn the ones needed for this role.

• Define and drive org-level SRE and platform engineering strategy
• Architect multi-region, multi-cloud (GCP & AWS) highly available systems
• Establish SLO/SLI standards, error budgets, and reliability governance across teams
• Lead design of platform abstractions (Terraform modules, Kubernetes platforms, Git Ops)
• Drive end-to-end observability architecture and reduce MTTR at scale
• Ensure services are production-ready, scalable, secure, and cost-optimized
• Lead SEV-1 incidents
  , RCA, and executive-level communication
• Influence product and engineering teams on architecture and reliability decisions
• Mentor senior engineers and act as a technical authority across orgs
• Drive automation, self-service platforms, and operational excellence

• 12-15+ years in Infrastructure, SRE, Dev Ops, or Systems Engineering
• 8-10+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems on AWS/GCP
• Proven experience driving cross-team or org-level technical initiatives
• Strong expertise in Terraform, Helm, or similar IaC frameworks
• Deep experience in automation (Python, Go, shell scripting)
• Strong hands-on expertise in Kubernetes at scale
• Advanced knowledge of Linux, networking, and distributed systems debugging
• Experience with CI/CD (Git Lab) and Git Ops (ArgoCD)
• Strong background in observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, tracing)
• Ability to lead incident management and complex production troubleshooting
• Excellent communication skills; ability to influence directors and VPs
• Demonstrated leadership in mentoring and setting engineering standards
• Strong ownership, with focus on scalability, reliability, and long-term architecture

The compensation offered for this position will depend on qualifications, experience, and work location. For candidates who receive an offer at the posted level, the starting base salary (for non-sales roles) or base salary + commission target (for…