Palo Alto Senior Manager Performance Engineering- Cortex 

United States, California 

336284239

Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.

Responsibilities

• Leadership & Strategy
  

  • Define and execute the performance engineering strategy across products, platforms, and services.

  • Establish key performance metrics, SLAs, and success criteria aligned with customer and business needs.

  • Build and scale a global team of performance engineers, fostering innovation, accountability, and excellence.
    

• Engineering & Execution
  

  • Oversee the design and development of performance test frameworks, automation tools, and simulation environments for end-to-end system testing.

  • Drive benchmarking and profiling of distributed systems under realistic load and stress scenarios.

  • Collaborate with engineering and architecture teams to identify bottlenecks and provide tuning recommendations for backend, frontend, APIs, databases, and infrastructure.

  • Ensure performance engineering is integrated early in the SDLC (“shift-left” approach).
    

• Cross-Functional Collaboration
  

  • Partner with product management and architects to define scalability goals and capacity models.

  • Work with DevOps/SRE to ensure production readiness, observability, and monitoring align with performance standards.

  • Provide leadership in incident investigations involving performance and scalability issues in production.
    

• Innovation & Continuous Improvement
  

  • Champion performance best practices, methodologies, and metrics across the organization.

  • Introduce AI-driven performance insights, predictive modeling, and automated anomaly detection.

  • Continuously evaluate emerging tools, technologies, and practices to evolve the performance engineering strategy.

Your Experience

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering or quality engineering, with at least 5 years in performance engineering.

• 5+ years of experience managing and scaling high-performing engineering teams.

• Strong expertise in distributed systems, microservices, cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), and container technologies (Kubernetes, Docker).

• Proficiency in performance tools and frameworks (e.g., JMeter, Gatling, Locust, k6, LoadRunner, custom frameworks).

• Deep understanding of system profiling, database tuning, caching, and network optimization.

• Strong communication, leadership, and stakeholder management skills.

• Experience introducing innovative approaches (e.g., ML/AI-driven performance analysis, chaos engineering).

Why Join Us

• Opportunity to lead a critical function that impacts customer experience and business growth.

• Work on cutting-edge cloud-scale challenges with a talented global team.

• Drive innovation in performance engineering, automation, and AI-driven insights.

• Collaborate with leaders across engineering, product, and operations to shape the future of our platform.

Why Join Us

• Opportunity to lead a critical function that impacts customer experience and business growth.

• Work on cutting-edge cloud-scale challenges with a talented global team.

• Drive innovation in performance engineering, automation, and AI-driven insights.

• Collaborate with leaders across engineering, product, and operations to shape the future of our platform.

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 $185000 - $275000. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found .

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