Distinguished Engineer Software; Cortex Platform) 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.

Cortex Platform - Cortex is the industry's only open and integrated, AI-based, continuous security platform. Cortex is a significant evolution of the Application Framework designed to simplify security operations and considerably improve outcomes. Deployed on a global, scalable public cloud platform, Cortex allows security operations teams to speed the analysis of massive data sets.

As a Distinguished Engineer for the Cortex Platform, you will serve as a key technical leader driving the innovation, development, and scaling of our industry-leading cybersecurity products, including Cortex Cloud, XSOAR, XDR, and XSIAM. You will architect shared infrastructures and tackle complex backend challenges to deliver exceptional value to thousands of enterprise customers. Leveraging AI-native architectures and cloud technologies, you will optimize data processing pipelines and distributed systems.

This role requires a visionary approach and a passion for solving the world's most critical cybersecurity threats.

• Drive long-term technical vision and architecture for critical Cortex platforms and services.
• Design highly scalable, secure, and cost-efficient distributed systems for processing massive data volumes.
• Serve as a technical leader, providing consultation and collaborating across engineering teams to ensure alignment.
• Lead cross-team architecture decisions, balancing scalability, performance, operational complexity, and engineering velocity.
• Architect and optimize cloud-native infrastructure, data pipelines, distributed storage, and real-time analytics platforms.
• Own and resolve complex technical challenges spanning multiple services, teams, and cybersecurity products.
• Drive adoption of AI-native architectures, agentic AI, and intelligent automation across engineering workflows.
• Identify opportunities to apply AI to accelerate development, testing, troubleshooting, and overall operational efficiency.

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 14+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a focus on distributed, cloud-native application development.
• Expert-level programming skills in Python, Go, with proven experience building large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of computer science fundamentals, including concurrency, networking, operating systems, databases, and storage systems.
• Extensive experience with cloud development, including REST…