Senior Principal Software Engineer/Architect

Who you are

• Proven Technical Leadership: Exceptional ability to own large-scale platform projects from inception to production delivery, driving complex initiatives either independently or by rally-point leadership of cross-functional engineering teams
• Expertise in Distributed Systems: Deep, battle-tested experience designing, debugging, and scaling highly complex distributed systems and cloud infrastructure (e.g., Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, or similar cloud-native tech stacks)
• AI Ecosystem Competency: Highly proficient with the modern AI tooling ecosystem. Practical experience applying AI, LLM integrations, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or agentic frameworks to solve real-world system engineering problems, automate observability, or streamline developer tooling
• Relentless Problem-Solving & Empathy: A strong passion for identifying friction points, coupled with a deep empathy for internal software developers as your primary customers. The driving curiosity to constantly dissect and learn intricate, multi-layered domain areas
• Feedback-Driven & Collaborative Mindset: A highly flexible, collaborative working style with a strong habit of actively seeking out feedback to refine technical designs, combined with the openness to communicate transparently and ask for help when navigating deeply complex architectural blocks
• Language & Tooling Agility: Fluency in modern backend or infrastructure languages (such as Go, Python, or similar). Specific syntax matters less than a track record of spending significant time executing large-scale projects where these technologies are deployed

What the job involves

• We are looking for a visionary Senior Principal Engineer/Architect to serve as the technical authority for our global SRE and Platform Engineering initiatives across the US and India
• This isn't just a "keep the lights on" role; you will be the primary architect and key technical driver of our AI-driven Autonomous SRE transformation at Palo Alto Networks
• Acting as a strategic bridge between infrastructure products and operational excellence, you will partner directly with product architectures and engineering teams to translate complex requirements into automated, intelligent self-service platform capabilities, ensuring our global systems are not just reliable, but fully self-healing
• Identify and Architect End-to-End Solutions: Actively audit and identify current systemic bottlenecks across all infrastructure processes, release pipelines, and core services offered by the Platform/SRE organization
• Design and deliver complex architectural frameworks that eliminate operational friction and address team-wide pain points
• Drive AI-Powered Innovation: Spearhead the integration of advanced AI tooling, LLMs, and agentic workflows into the SRE ecosystem
• Build intelligent platform features that proactively optimize infrastructure costs, reduce cognitive load during high-pressure situations, and automate the triage of complex system anomalies
• Lead Scale and Reliability Engineering: Take full ownership of projects from inception to delivery—acting as the ultimate technical authority—to ensure our distributed systems, binary/config deployment frameworks, and observability pipelines scale seamlessly across cloud-native environments
• Collaborate Cross-Functional & Think Beyond Implementation: Work closely with cross-functional leaders, engineering teams, and internal stakeholders to turn unstructured system metrics and process inefficiencies into highly automated, intuitive platform workflows
• Challenge legacy assumptions to elevate the overall developer experience
• Share Infrastructure & Tooling Accountability: Partner with platform engineers across the organization to design, maintain, and revolutionize automated validation frameworks, immutable artifact deployment structures, and resilient self-healing infrastructure
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Foster a culture of accelerated learning, continuous growth, and high engineering standards
• Mentor senior technical colleagues across the company in building reliable, highly performant, and intelligent platform systems through direct mentorship and design review leadership

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