Principal software engineer

Company Description

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks® everything starts and ends with our mission:

Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.
Our vision is a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. We are a company built on the foundation of challenging and disrupting the way things are done, and we’re looking for innovators who are as committed to shaping the future of cybersecurity as we are.

Who We Are

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.

Your Career

We are seeking a Software Engineer to develop, build, and maintain our cutting edge cloud based, security product Infrastructure, which operates at massive scale and helps protect customers against constantly evolving online threats and attacks. Bring your software engineering expertise to work on our cutting edge malware detection platform, WildFire.

We want passionate engineers who love to design and code world-class security services on Cloud Providers. Engineers who bring new ideas in all facets of software development, individual contributors who want to expand their skill set, take ownership of their feature areas and who are driven to solve problems at every level.

Participate in the design, deployment and scaling of our architecture as we transform it by using cloud native solutions on GCP. Participate in the redesign of the architecture to introduce appropriate microservices to process high rates of sample submissions. Collaboration and teamwork are at the foundation of our culture and we need engineers who can communicate and work well with others towards achieving a common goal.

Your Impact

• Participate in the complete software development life cycle including requirement analysis, design, development, deployment and support

• Write clean, testable, readable, scalable and maintainable Python, C, Golang code that scales and performs well for thousands of customers

• Participate actively and contribute to design and development discussions

• Be able to clearly communicate goals and desired outcomes to internal project teams

Your Experience

• Hands on experience writing production high quality scalable code in Python, C, Golang keeping performance in mind.

• Strong knowledge of data structures, algorithms, operating systems, and distributed systems fundamentals.

• Great design and architecture skills, turning an idea into a production grade design.

• Very strong knowledge of databases, storage, and distributed persistence technologies.

  • Hands on experience with databases like SQL/NoSQL and other modern databases is a plus

• Experience with writing asynchronous code in multi-threaded and multi-processes env

• Good to have a cloud-native service development stack on GCP/AWS or other clouds.

• Experience with building REST/grpc API services

• Writing code with quality in mind from the get go.

• Experience working with queuing system such as pubsub, RabbitMQ or Kafka

• Exposure to using configuration management tools such as argocd, Ansible and/or Terraform

• You enjoy working in a collaborative environment

• Strong problem solving and troubleshooting skills

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering / Computer science or equivalent military experience required

• A plus would be to have 6+ years of experience in this role

The Team

To stay ahead of the curve, it’s critical to know where the curve is, and how to anticipate the changes we may be facing. For the fastest growing cybersecurity company, the curve is the evolution of cyberattacks, and the products and services that proactively address them. As a predictive enterprise environment, we analyze petabytes of data that pass through our walls daily and we hire the most talented minds in data science to build creative predictive analytics and data science solutions for our cybersecurity solutions.

We define the industry, instead of waiting for directions. We need individuals who feel comfortable in ambiguity, excited by the prospect of a challenge, and empowered by the unknown risks facing our everyday lives that are only enabled by a secure digital environment.

Compensation Disclosure

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 between $147000/YR - $237500/YR. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found here.

Our Commitment


We’re problem solvers that take risks and challenge cybersecurity’s status quo. It’s simple: we can’t accomplish our mission without diverse teams innovating, together.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for all qualified individuals with a disability. If you require assistance or accommodation due to a disability or special need, please contact us at [email protected].

Palo Alto Networks is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity in our workplace, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or other legally protected characteristics.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Is role eligible for Immigration Sponsorship?: Yes