Principal Engineer

Who you are

• Education & Experience: BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience) with 5+ years of professional experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or Cloud Platform Engineering
• Orchestration & Containers: Deep, hands-on expertise with Kubernetes (GKE), container runtime environments, and service mesh architectures
• GitOps & CI/CD Pipelines: Extensive production experience with ArgoCD for continuous delivery and GitLab CI/CD for automating complex software delivery pipelines
• Infrastructure-as-Code: Proven proficiency in managing production cloud infrastructure using Terraform or similar IaC tools
• GCP Data Infrastructure: Direct experience administering and performance-tuning GCP Bigtable (BT) and GCP BigQuery (BQ) in high-throughput environments
• Systems Programming & Scripting: Strong programming skills in Python, Go, or Bash to automate infrastructure tasks and develop platform tooling
• Monitoring & Observability: Experience with cloud-native monitoring systems (such as Prometheus, Grafana, or GCP Cloud Monitoring)
• Enterprise Security: Familiarity with cloud security compliance, IAM controls, and securing container workloads

What the job involves

• In order to be the cybersecurity partner of choice, we must trailblaze the path and shape the future of our industry
• This is something our employees work at each day and is defined by our values: Disruption, Collaboration, Execution, Integrity, and Inclusion. We weave AI into the fabric of everything we do and use it to augment the impact every individual can have. If you are passionate about solving real-world problems and ideating beside the best and the brightest, we invite you to join us!
• 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
• As a Platform Engineer on our newly forming team, you will design, build, and maintain the secure, highly available, and scalable infrastructure that powers our next-generation threat prevention platforms
• You will manage our orchestration plane and automate the deployment pipelines that keep our inline engines, data pipelines, and AI models running at peak performance globally. Your work is the bedrock of our system's reliability, enabling engineering teams to deliver cutting-edge security products at scale
• Architect, configure, and maintain high-scale Kubernetes clusters on Google Cloud Platform, optimizing for performance, resource utilization, and secure network isolation
• Deploy, scale, and optimize core GCP managed data services, specifically Bigtable (for low-latency streaming telemetry) and BigQuery (for large-scale data analytics)
• Design and implement robust Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) solutions to manage global multi-region environments deterministically
• Build and support robust CI/CD deployment pipelines, automated validation gates, and version pinning configurations for our platform microservices
• Partner with Data Plane and Data Pipeline engineers to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize resource bounds, ensuring sub-millisecond data processing stability
• Drive site reliability engineering (SRE) practices, establishing observability dashboards, metrics collection, and proactive alerting frameworks

Benefits

• Healthcare: We value your health and provide options so you can choose what best supports your lifestyle and personal health goals. Various nationwide plans — including Blue Shield of California, Kaiser Permanente, Delta Dental, VSP, and more — are available to you and your family. Our providers offer the flexibility you want and the coverage you need
• Wellness: With a large on-site gym and daily, instructor-led exercise classes at HQ in Santa Clara, Palo Alto Networks actively supports employee fitness. Our juice bar, Gym & Juice, features fresh juice blends, a quick and nutritious option pre- or post-workout. And our ongoing wellness speaker series highlights the latest trends in health and wellness
• Development: Professional development is serious business at Palo Alto Networks, where the Talent Development team offers 25+ courses to help employees boost their careers and develop leadership capability
• Financial: Most roles are eligible for equity grants, and we now offer new hires a quarterly vesting schedule right away. We want you to be fairly compensated and rewarded as soon as you make an impact – on our team, that happens immediately! And because we consider every employee a stakeholder in our long-term success, we offer an Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) with a 24-month lookback. From life insurance to health savings accounts, we provide ways to help you protect and grow your wealth. Palo Alto Networks offers both traditional and Roth 401(k) options, along with a company match of 50% to a max annual amount of $1,000
• Time Off: In addition to paid corporate holidays, Flexible Time Off programs empower our employees to balance their work schedules with personal time off. We offer 12 weeks of full pay for medical leave and 6 weeks of full pay for parental leave. As a company with strong ties to the military and veterans, we also offer 26 weeks of full pay for military leave
• Perks: Our corporate discount program provides employees with significant discounts on merchandise, travel and entertainment. We offer many on-site perks at headquarters, including cafeterias, fuel service, dry cleaning service, EV charging stations, and a company store. We also provide complimentary drinks, fresh fruit, and snacks in break rooms across our campus to help everyone power through the day.

Life at Palo Alto Network