Principal Software Engineer (Cortex Xpanse)

Palo Alto Networks
Cupertino, CA

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 take our mission of protecting the digital way of life seriously. We are relentless in protecting our customers and we believe that the unique ideas of every member of our team contributes to our collective success. Our values were crowdsourced by employees and are brought to life through each of us everyday - from disruptive innovation and collaboration, to execution. From showing up for each other with integrity to creating an environment where we all feel included.

As a member of our team, you will be shaping the future of cybersecurity. We work fast, value ongoing learning, and we respect each employee as a unique individual. Knowing we all have different needs, our development and personal wellbeing programs are designed to give you choice in how you are supported. This includes our FLEXBenefits wellbeing spending account with over 1,000 eligible items selected by employees, our mental and financial health resources, and our personalized learning opportunities - just to name a few!

At Palo Alto Networks, we believe in the power of collaboration and value in-person interactions. This is why our employees generally work full time from our office with flexibility offered where needed. This setup fosters casual conversations, problem-solving, and trusted relationships. Our goal is to create an environment where we all win with precision.

Job Description

Your Career

In this role, you will be an integral part of the group that enables customers to engage with their data through our web application. You will design and build data models, APIs, and user interfaces in collaboration with other engineers, and own end-to-end delivery of customer-facing features. You will draw upon your experience to rapidly investigate and prototype new functionality, then switch to implementation mode to deliver products. You will guide and mentor your team in enterprise software development, architecture and technical design, and the evaluation thereof. You will represent your team in technical roadmap planning and cross-team design review sessions, working regularly with senior engineers from other teams, as well as architects, UX designers, and product managers.

Your expertise will help define and secure the perimeters of the world's most important organizations.

Your Impact

As a Principal Engineer on a feature team, you will:

  • Drive projects from requirements to complete design and implementation, often as project lead

  • Collaborate closely with product management, UX design, and fellow engineering stakeholders to align efforts across the product

  • Cultivate a big-picture perspective that enables you to spot existing and impending problems, then work with senior engineers and leadership across the department to analyze and solve them

  • Mentor engineers in your team and others, ensuring your team delivers high output

  • Represent your team in cross-team technical collaboration and consultation

  • Continuously seek ways to make a substantial impact on your team and the broader engineering organization

  • Design, build, and optimize data models and queries for speed and scale, using data storage technologies like MySQL and BigQuery

  • Design and build business logic and API endpoints using Python and Flask

  • Build user interfaces using Angular

Qualifications

Your Experience

A strong candidate for this role should have:

  • 5+ years of industry experience as a professional software engineer building customer-facing software for a SaaS business

  • Significant experience providing technical leadership of teams building enterprise features on a multi-tenant SaaS platform at scale (examples: role-based access, SAML integrations, feature flag frameworks)

  • Excitement to dig in, prototype, build, test, and see projects through to production

  • Ability to balance shipping new products and features with addressing technical debt and investments in architecture and infrastructure

  • Strong familiarity with databases, data modeling, profiling, and performance optimization

  • Strong understanding of various methods and tradeoffs for handling concurrency

  • Experience with and informed opinions about API design and distributed backend systems

  • Significant experience with Python

  • Knowledge of GCP (a plus but not required)

Additional Information

The Team

Xpanse helps protect some of the world’s most important organizations by finding risks on the Internet that no one else can find. Our product engineering teams are responsible for building the user-facing security products that allow customers to turn trillions of Internet data points into critical cybersecurity insights.

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 $0 - $0/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.

Posted 2025-12-28

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