Principal Engineer Machine Learning (MLOps DLP Detection)

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.

Job Description

Your Career

We are looking for a Principal MLOps Engineer to lead the design, development, and operation of production-grade machine learning infrastructure at scale. In this role, you will architect robust pipelines, deploy and monitor ML models, and ensure reliability, reproducibility, and governance across our AI/ML ecosystem. You will work at the intersection of ML, DevOps, and cloud systems, enabling our teams to accelerate experimentation while ensuring secure, efficient, and compliant deployments.

This role is located at our dynamic Santa Clara California headquarters campus, and in office 3 days a week. Not a remote role.

Your Impact

• End-to-End ML Architecture and Delivery Ownership: Architect, design, and lead the implementation of the entire ML lifecycle. This includes ML model development and deployment workflows that seamlessly transition models from initial experimentation/development to complex cloud and hybrid production environments.
• Operationalize Models at Scale: Develop and maintain highly automated, resilient systems that enable the continuous training, rigorous testing, deployment, real-time monitoring, and robust rollback of machine learning models in production, ensuring performance meets massive scale demands.
• Ensure Reliability and Governance: Establish and enforce state-of-the-art practices for model versioning, reproducibility, auditing, lineage tracking, and compliance across the entire model inventory.
• Drive Advanced Observability & Monitoring: Develop comprehensive, real-time monitoring, alerting, and logging solutions focused on deep operational health, model performance analysis (e.g., drift detection), and business metric impact.
• Champion Automation & Efficiency: Act as the primary driver for efficiency, pioneering best practices in Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), sophisticated container orchestration, and continuous delivery (CD) to reduce operational toil.
• Collaborate and Lead Cross-Functionally: Partner closely Security Teams, and Product Engineering to define requirements and deliver robust, secure, and production-ready AI systems.
• Lead MLOps Innovation: Continuously evaluate, prototype, and introduce cutting-edge tools, frameworks, and practices that fundamentally elevate the scalability, reliability, and security posture of our production ML operations.
• Optimize Infrastructure & Cost: Strategically manage and optimize ML infrastructure resources to drive down operational costs, improve efficiency, and reduce model bootstrapping times.

Qualifications

Your Experience

• 8+ years of software/DevOps/ML engineering experience, with at least 3+ years focused specifically on advanced MLOps, ML Platform, or production ML infrastructure and 5+ yeas of experience building ML Models
• Deep expertise in building scalable, production-grade systems using strong programming skills (Python, Go, or Java).
• Expertise in leveraging cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure) and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker) for ML workloads.
• Proven hands-on experience in the ML Infrastructure lifecycle, including:
  • Model Serving: (TensorFlow Serving, TorchServe, Triton Inference Server/TIS).
  • Workflow Orchestration: (Airflow, Kubeflow, MLflow, Ray, Vertex AI, SageMaker).
• Mandatory Experience with Advanced Inferencing Techniques: Demonstrable ability to utilize advanced hardware/software acceleration and optimization techniques, such as TensorRT (TRT), Triton Inference Server (TIS), ONNX Runtime, Model Distillation, Quantization, and pruning.
• Strong, hands-on experience with comprehensive CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Helm), and robust monitoring/observability solutions (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stack).
• Comprehensive knowledge of data pipelines, feature stores, and high-throughput streaming systems (Kafka, Spark, Flink).
• Expertise in operationalizing ML models, including model monitoring, drift detection, automated retraining pipelines, and maintaining strong governance and security frameworks.
• A strong track record of influencing cross-functional stakeholders, defining organizational best practices, and actively mentoring engineers at all levels.
• Unwavering passion for operational excellence, building highly scalable, and securing mission-critical ML systems.
• MS/PhD in Computer Science/Data Science, 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 the 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.

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 - $175,000 - $220,000/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

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