Principal Software Engineer - Back End; Wildfire

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 Principal Software Engineer, you will play a key role in the design and implementation of our Threat Intelligence Services for public and private cloud features. Participate in all phases of the product development lifecycle from definition, design, through implementation and test.

Bring your software engineering expertise to work on our cutting edge malware detection platform, Wild Fire. Participate in the design, deployment and scaling of our architecture as we transform it by using cloud native solutions on GCP. Lead the redesign of the architecture to introduce appropriate microservices to process high rates of sample submissions.

We are the Threat Prevention and Cloud Service Infrastructure team. We are at the core of our products and deliver the best of security services in the cloud to prevent cyberattacks. We are constantly innovating and challenging the way we, and the whole industry, think about cybersecurity.

• Bring new ideas to develop security disciplines to solve real‑world problems.
• Design and implement real‑time security services for our customers.
• Establish a clear technical and architectural vision for key projects.
• Collaborate closely with product managers, architects and dev‑ops to achieve quality releases.
• Make appropriate trade‑offs to optimize time‑to‑release while maintaining performance and scalability requirements.
• Play a key role design/re‑design by using cloud native GCP solutions.
• Promote best practices such as design reviews, code reviews, secure coding and performance tuning.
• Mentoring junior developers.

• Hands‑on, principal level software engineer implementing massively scalable platforms leveraging cloud technologies and distributed systems.
• Advanced level programming in Python, GoLang.
• Experience designing microservices architecture using containerization technologies like Docker or Kubernetes.
• Demonstrated experience working with Public Cloud Services such as AWS or GCP and designing cloud‑native solutions.
• Knowledge of the Dev Ops workflow.
• Experience with data infrastructure platforms.
• Experience with SQL and No‑SQL DB technologies such as MySQL, Redis, Big Table, Big Query.
• Experience with queuing systems such as RabbitMQ or Kafka or Pub Sub.
• Experience with multi‑threads and multi‑processes achieving a common goal.
• Experience in leading and doing big projects end to end.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills required.
• BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related field.

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 sales/commissioned roles) is expected to be the annual range listed below. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus.

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