Palo Alto Principal Engineer Software - Central Cloud Platform 

United States, California 

642126823

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

Your Career

As a Principal Engineer, you will be an innovator who can challenge the status quo, thrive in a fast-paced environment, and architect elegant solutions to complex platform-level problems. You will have a massive impact on thousands of engineers by shaping the technical direction of the team and mentoring other engineers to foster a culture of engineering excellence.

This role is located at our dynamic Santa Clara, California headquarters campus.

Your Impact

• You will be responsible for building the next generation of platforms that accelerate product development across the company. The core problems we are solving are foundational and will have a massive impact. If these challenges excite you, you are a great fit for our team.

• Simplify and Automate Onboarding: Design and implement streamlined platforms to radically simplify new customer and new region onboarding, reducing time-to-value and operational complexity.

• Build a Scalable Workflow Service: Own the creation and operation of a "Workflow as a Service" platform, providing reliable, scalable orchestration for various product teams by running technologies like multi-tenant Temporal at scale.

• Champion Cost Optimization: Develop a Central Cost Platform that provides a holistic inventory service, enabling product teams to "shift-left" on cost awareness, eliminate unnecessary infrastructure spending, and auto-remediate regressions.

• Deliver Agentic Compute as a Service: Create a robust agentic compute platform for running standalone agents, providing a secure and vetted environment with managed control plane servers for various agentic workloads.

Your Experience

• We are looking for someone who cares deeply about the technical development of other engineers and can effectively balance the needs of the business, our users, and the growth of our engineers.

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

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong background in building large-scale, distributed systems.

• Proven track record of building SaaS applications and being part of several SaaS release cycles.

• Strong proficiency in at least one of the following languages: Go, Python, or Java, with a proven ability to pick up a new language with ease.

• Deep experience with cloud-native technologies including containerization (Docker) and microservices architecture.

• Decent understanding of core distributed systems principles. You should have an ability to continuously map problems to first principles.

• Familiarity with modern SaaS release models, including feature flags.

• Extensive hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform (GCP or AWS) is strongly recommended.

• Demonstrated experience mentoring at least two engineers in their career, providing technical guidance, and helping them achieve promotion.

• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to troubleshoot complex issues in a distributed environment.

• Strong communication skills and the ability to work collaboratively across teams.

Nice to Have

• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes. Since we are a platform team and use it extensively, deep K8s knowledge will help you stand out.

• Familiarity with agentic infrastructure and a basic curiosity on how to build and manage intelligent agents.

• Experience building applications with temporal.

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 $173,000/YR - $237,500/YR. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. The description of our employee benefits may be found here.

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