Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Who you are

• Education & Experience: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience), or 7+ years of professional software engineering experience writing production-grade code
• Core Software & API Development: Expertise in Python (preferred), Go, TypeScript, or C++, with deep experience developing, debugging, and integrating enterprise APIs (REST, gRPC, WebSockets) and API gateways (e.g., Envoy, Kong)
• AI & LLM Architecture: Hands-on experience with LLM orchestration, prompt security, token optimization, model routing, and vector databases / RAG architectures
• Infrastructure & Cloud Native: Proficiency with containerization, orchestration, and infrastructure-as-code (Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform) across major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Security & Networking: Solid understanding of enterprise security protocols including OIDC/OAuth2, zero-trust networking, and secure API integration
• Testing & Quality Assurance: Experience using testing frameworks (e.g., PyTest, unittest) and robust evaluation workflows for distributed systems
• Customer & Strategic Impact: Proven ability to interface directly with executive leadership (CIOs/CISOs) and IT decision-makers—whiteboarding enterprise architectures, translating complex customer needs, and directly influencing product roadmaps
• Engineering Mindset: A hands-on "0-to-1" builder mentality who thrives in ambiguous environments, owns problems end-to-end, and enjoys pair-programming or digging into raw code and traces to solve live outages
• AI Evaluation & Frameworks: Familiarity with LLM evaluation frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, OpenAI Evals) and model performance/benchmarking metrics
• AI Safety & Adversarial Testing: Practical knowledge of AI security guardrails, bias detection, prompt injection defense, and adversarial testing practices
• Observability & Monitoring: Hands-on experience with enterprise observability, tracing, and log-monitoring systems (e.g., Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus)
• Simulation & Synthetic Data: Exposure to synthetic data generation, automated data pipelines, and test simulation environments

What the job involves

• As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) for Prisma AIRS, you are a hands-on developer and systems architect who embeds with customer engineering teams. You write production code, design low-latency topologies, and build custom plugins to ship secure enterprise AI workloads to production. You bridge the gap between customer production environments and core engineering, extending the platform edge while directly contributing code back to the core Prisma AIRS engine
• Write production-grade code (Python, Go, TypeScript) to integrate Prisma AIRS with microservices, API meshes, and multi-cloud architectures
• Build custom middleware/plugins for identity-aware policies, prompt security, dynamic routing, and telemetry pipelines
• Develop automated deployment modules (Terraform, Helm, Kubernetes) and SDK wrappers
• Optimize high-throughput, low-latency traffic paths including streaming payloads, caching, and load balancing
• Lead Architectural Design Reviews (ADRs) with customer Principal Engineers and CISOs for zero-trust deployments
• Deploy hybrid, multi-cloud, or VPC-isolated gateway topologies across multi-LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, local vLLM)
• Serve as the tier-3 engineering point of contact for live production systems, debugging distributed systems bottlenecks
• Analyze OpenTelemetry/Prometheus traces to diagnose edge-case failures in AI agent frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, and AutoGen
• Upstream custom plugins, bug fixes, and edge integrations directly into core product repositories
• Partner with Product and Core SWE to turn enterprise architectural patterns into platform features
• Convert customer implementations into reusable reference architectures, deployment patterns, and automation frameworks
• Identify feature gaps, usability improvements, and operational pain points to influence the product roadmap

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