Principal Software Engineer (Backend)

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.

Our Approach to Work

At Palo Alto Networks, we believe in the power of collaboration and value in-person interactions. This is why our employees generally work from the office three days per week, leaving two days for choice and flexibility to work where you feel most effective. This setup fosters casual conversations, problem-solving, and trusted relationships. While details may evolve, our goal is to create an environment where innovation thrives, with office-based teams coming together three days a week to collaborate and thrive, together!

Job Description

Your Career

In a world where remote work is the new norm, organizations' perimeters are much more loosely defined and cloud-native apps replace data centers rapidly, a new approach is needed to provide connectivity, compliance and security for all.

Prisma Access (formally GlobalProtect Cloud Service) provides protection straight from the cloud to make access to the cloud secure. It combines the connectivity and security you need - and delivers it everywhere you need it. Using cutting-edge public and private cloud technologies extending the next-generation security protection to all cloud services, customers on-premise remote networks and mobile users.

As a Principal Engineer - you will build and design distributed backend services that are the backbone of our platform. You will need to think wide about all system components and will need to consider the trade-offs with every design decision you make.

You will work with the latest technologies and development methodologies to achieve the best outcomes.

This is a unique opportunity to join very early and take charge of new product architecture and build it from scratch.

Your Impact

• Analyze requirements, design, develop and support highly scalable software features and infrastructure on our next-generation security platform ready for cloud native deployment from inception to completion.
• Write clean, testable, readable, scalable and maintainable code that scales and performs well for thousands of customers.
• Actively guide testing of critical components in the product, taking into account complex considerations of multiple platforms, performance, supportability, maintainability and much more.
• Collaborate closely with the Product management, Development, Quality Assurance, SRE and Customer support teams on delivering the roadmap and improving customer outcomes.
• Drive a results-oriented culture with a strong focus on execution, quality, and speed.
• Be a strong mentor and coach to the team, innovate around tools and process development.
• Write design documents, software development guidelines, and best practices.
• Advocates for changes in the architecture based on new technologies, business context and future roadmaps.
• Be able to clearly communicate goals and desired outcomes to internal project teams, explain highly complex Cloud Computing and Security concepts to others.
• This role requires participating in an on-call rotation to troubleshoot and resolve customer issues and incidents.

Qualifications

Your Experience

• Your Experience
• 10+ years' experience in building complex, high scale SaaS solutions. Preferably experienced in Golang.
• Passion for software engineering and coding, energetic and eager to create and outperform.
• Experience in developing cloud distributed applications and cloud infrastructures.
• Strong computer science fundamentals and understanding of principles of DevOps and Continuous Delivery
• Proven record designing and implementing scalable REST APIs, services and data pipelines.
• Hands-on experience using SQL/NoSQL based databases.
• Understanding of microservices-based deployments with the ability to introduce monitoring/tracing of application logs.
• Experience handling Devops, SRE, availability and reliability outcomes for a large cloud product.
• 5+ years Experience with running complex workloads on cloud-based architectures on one or more cloud platforms, such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes and their technologies (Lambda functions, SNS/SQS etc.).
• B.S. or B.A. in Computer Science or Engineering.

Additional Information

The Team

Our engineering team is at the core of our products and connected directly to the mission of preventing cyberattacks. We are constantly innovating - challenging the way we, and the industry, think about cybersecurity. Our engineers don't shy away from building products to solve problems no one has pursued before.

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.

You will be part of a growing, passionate, and dynamic team with an opportunity to work on challenging and exciting projects - centered on what we believe is one of the most significant mission statements in the world. We also strive to be the most people-centric company ever! That means we're constantly working to make your experience amazing, and you are part of the team breaking boundaries of what the workplace can be!

We are committed to bringing our FLEXWORK philosophy. You will be part of a global team and for many roles, we offer employee choice on work location (office or mostly from home) for most of our roles.

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 - $233200YR. 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

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.