Palo Alto Sr Principal Software Engineer Cortex Xpanse Vulnerability Assessment 

United States, California 

399964127

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

Your Career

In the role of Senior Principal Software Engineer on the Vulnerability Assessment Research team, you will serve as a respected technical leader within the organization, collaborating frequently across teams. You will be responsible for overseeing projects from inception to execution as either the project lead or mentor, guiding the design and implementation process. Additionally, you will take the lead in coordinating planned work across the product in conjunction with product management, UX design, and other engineering stakeholders. Leveraging your broad perspective, you will identify and address existing and potential challenges and collaborate with senior engineers and department leadership to analyze and resolve them effectively.

Your Impact

As a Senior Principal Software engineer on the Vulnerability Assessment Research team, you will:

• Work regularly across teams as an acknowledged technical leader in the organization
• Drive projects from requirements to complete design and implementation as project lead or mentor thereof
• Lead efforts to align planned work across the product in collaboration with product management, UX design, and fellow engineering stakeholders
• Utilize your big-picture perspective to spot existing and impending problems, then work with senior engineers and leadership across the department to analyze and solve them
• Proactively spot, articulate, and mitigate risks in ongoing and planned projects to ensure smooth execution and high output. This may include providing ad hoc mentorship, communicating with project stakeholders, or rolling up your sleeves and stepping in to help move things along
• Guide the key technical work on the team, including shaping architectural decisions, communicating impact and requirements to stakeholders, and driving toward end-to-end value
• Mentor engineers across the department
• Regularly provide cross-team technical collaboration and consultation
• 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

Your Experience

• 8+ years of industry experience as a professional software engineer building customer-facing software for a SaaS business
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems and architecture, including an understanding of what it takes to deploy and maintain such systems
• Experience with on-prem deployment and the risks associated with shipping software to a customer environment
• Good understanding of networking and cybersecurity fundamentals
• Extensive experience providing technical leadership within and across teams building enterprise features on a multi-tenant SaaS platform at scale
• 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

• Expert knowledge and informed opinions on at least one of:

  • Databases, data modeling, profiling, and performance optimization

  • Methods and tradeoffs for handling concurrency

  • API design and distributed backend systems

• BS in computer science or related engineering discipline, or equivalent work experience or equivalent military experience required
• Proficient in one or more programming languages (ideally in Python)
• Experience using cloud managed services (ideally in GCP)

In this role, you will work with a highly talented team of engineers building a new product that leverages cutting-edge AI technology. You will drive technical designs and critical decisions related to the architecture, deployment strategy, and capabilities of the Vulnerability Assessment Research system. As you support your team, you will also be a part of the team of technical leaders building Unified Vulnerability and Exposure Management. You will collaborate closely with other engineers in the group and with other teams across the Cortex product suite. As part of this, you will help shape Palo Alto Networks vision of a proactive security platform. Your expertise will help secure the world's most important organizations and impact the future of the cybersecurity industry.

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 $182,000/YR - $295,000/YR. 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.