Engineering Manager – Backend & Infrastructure; AI Posture

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

As an Engineering Manager on the AI Posture team, you will lead a high-performing backend team of 8–10 engineers operating in one of our most complex and cross-functional domains. This role requires a blend of empathetic people leadership, operational excellence, and deep backend systems expertise—specifically around Go microservices, high-efficiency runtime environments, and lower-level infrastructure abstraction.

You will lead with empathy to support, empower, and grow your engineers while staying on the cutting edge by being an AI-savvy leader—embracing AI-driven development practices, modern engineering tools, and intelligent automation to boost team productivity and runtime performance.

• Empathetic Team Leadership:
  Build, mentor, and lead a backend engineering team using an empathy-first approach. Foster an inclusive culture of psychological safety, trust, empowerment, and continuous growth.
• AI-Savvy Engineering Culture:
  Drive the adoption of modern AI tooling, modern engineering practice innovations, and intelligent automation across the software development life cycle to accelerate development and improve code quality.
• Backend & Microservices Architectures:
  Lead the design, execution, and optimization of high-throughput, low-latency microservices built predominantly in Go.
• Infrastructure & Platform Interaction:
  Partner directly with Infrastructure and Platform teams to ensure services interact seamlessly with cloud infrastructure, optimizing runtime efficiency, memory usage, compute density, and hardware/cloud resources.
• Roadmap & Cross‑Functional Alignment:
  Partner closely with Product Management, Security, and SRE teams to align priorities, translate technical strategy into execution, and deliver on multi‑quarter roadmaps with predictability and speed.
• Operational Excellence & Observability:
  Drive production readiness by enforcing rigorous standards for deployment pipelines, telemetry, tracing, performance tuning, and incident response across critical backend services.
• Technical Communication:
  Clearly communicate technical trade‑offs, systems architecture, risks, and strategies to executive leadership and strategic cross‑functional partners.

Required Qualifications

• 5–7 years of experience in software engineering management leading distributed backend systems teams.
• 8+ years of hands‑on software engineering experience with a strong systems‑level foundation, with primary expertise in Go (Golang) and concurrent programming patterns.
• Proven track…