Principal Engineer Software (Cortex Platform)Experience Level: Senior Level | Posted Date: 2025-04-14
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.
Your Career
As a Principal Backend Engineer within our On-Prem platform team, you play a pivotal role in building a new on-premise platform for running Cortex products - Cortex XSOAR, Cortex XDR, Cortex XSIAM and Cortex Cloud..
You will design and develop an infrastructure that supports billions of events per second, storing, processing and making them accessible and visible to the user while collaborating with the industry’s leading cyber products. Building a highly available, reliable and secured on-premise platform that performs just as good as the cloud product is a significant challenge. Your crucial role goes beyond development, involving cross-organizational impact collaboration to ensure success.
The great majority of the Cortex engineering group is located in the Santa Clara and Tel Aviv offices allowing us to operate at a high pace.
In this role, you will need to be creative, innovative and demonstrate deep knowledge in Kubernetes, conducting research to find new technologies, with a can-do approach, an internal drive for excellence and improvement, and thrive on bringing value to thousands of customers.
Your Impact
As a Principal Backend Engineer on the team, you will:
Huge! Work on a new product, implement major parts from design to implementation!
SAAS to on-premise challenge! Building / Enhancing an on-prem platform that will work seamlessly like the SAAS product.
Design, build, and optimize data models and queries for speed and scale, using data storage technologies like MySQL and BigQuery
Who knew? You do! Research new technologies and see how they can be adapted to the product
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
Kubernetes architecture! Design and implement HA, performance tuning, and disaster recovery strategies for Kubernetes clusters.
Design, architect, develop, and maintain Kubernetes architecture product
Implement custom Kubernetes operators to automate application lifecycle management and complex deployment scenarios.
Automate the deployment and configuration of Kubernetes clusters using infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible) solutions for on-prem Kubernetes clusters and applications.
Like CEPH, implements and manages cloud-native persistent storage solutions with Kubernetes clusters.
Manage and optimize storage solutions within the Kubernetes environment, including persistent volumes and storage classes.
Customer First! Provide technical guidance and support to customers deploying our applications in their chosen environments.
Your Experience
BS/MS in Computer Science or Computer Engineering or related technical degree
8+ years of hands-on experience in software backend engineering, with a focus on cloud-native application development, at large organizations or innovative startups
Strong programming skills in one of Python or Go, with experience in building distributed systems
Excellent troubleshooting abilities. Isolate issues found during testing and verify bug fixes once they are resolved
Experience with backend development (Rest APIs, Databases, Serverless computing) of distributed cloud applications
Strong understanding and applied knowledge of Kubernetes architecture deployments (such as Ansible, Kubespray, Helm, CDK8s, k8s managed and unmanaged) and a variety of Kubernetes distributions such as Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE2)
Experience with database technologies like ElasticSearch, MySQL, BigQuery, cloud technologies like S3, Pubsub, RabbitMQ and caching technologies like Redis.
Experience with cloud-native storage solutions (e.g. Ceph, Rook) with a Proven ability to develop and manage custom Kubernetes controllers or operators.
Good understanding of public cloud design considerations and limitations in areas of microservice architectures, security, global network infrastructure, distributed systems, and load balancing with proficiency in at least one cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure)
Strong understanding of principles of DevSecOps, DevOps and Continuous Delivery
Experience with the agile process and working with software development teams involved with making data-driven decisions for building out full stack products, deployed on the cloud at scale
Enjoys working with many different teams in a fast-paced environment with strong collaboration and communication skills
The Team
Join our dynamic team where innovation and collaboration thrive. Experience a workplace that fosters personal and professional growth, providing opportunities to take ownership of your career journey. Embrace the cutting edge of technology as we encourage professional work in software engineering, particularly in the cloud domain. Make a real impact in the security domain, contributing to solutions that directly benefit and protect our valued customers.
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 - $237500 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 [email protected].
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.