Principal Performance Engineer (Cortex Cloud)

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

We are seeking a Principal Performance Engineer to lead performance engineering initiatives for Cortex Cloud. In this role, you will define and implement strategies to measure, validate, and optimize the performance, scalability, and reliability of distributed microservices running in dynamic cloud environments. Your focus will be on developing robust performance testing frameworks, building automation for continuous performance validation, and identifying bottlenecks across the stack.

As a hands-on technical leader, you will work closely with Engineering, DevOps, SRE, Product, and QA teams to ensure our platform consistently delivers low-latency, high-throughput, and resilient services at scale. You’ll also influence architectural decisions with a performance-first mindset and shape best practices for performance testing, observability, and tuning.

Your Impact

• Design and implement end-to-end performance testing strategies for distributed cloud-native systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and responsiveness.
• Build and maintain robust, reusable performance test frameworks and pipelines using tools like JMeter, Locust, or custom Python-based solutions.
• Develop and execute load, stress, soak, and failover tests to simulate real-world usage patterns, edge cases, and peak load scenarios.
• Identify system bottlenecks, resource contention, and inefficiencies across services, infrastructure, and code; work cross-functionally to drive resolution.
• Collaborate with Product and Customer Success teams to understand key customer workflows and usage patterns, translating them into performance test scenarios.
• Integrate performance tests into CI/CD pipelines and staging environments to enable continuous performance validation and pre-release gatekeeping.
• Define and track key performance metrics (e.g., latency, throughput, system resource usage) and build dashboards using Prometheus, Grafana, or other observability platforms.
• Perform deep-dive analysis of performance test results, system telemetry, and application profiling data (e.g., Flamegraphs, heap dumps).
• Advocate for performance-first design principles across engineering teams; influence architectural decisions to improve system efficiency and testability.
• Contribute to chaos engineering and fault injection efforts to validate system resilience under adverse conditions.
• Lead incident retrospectives related to performance degradation and provide guidance for proactive tuning and improvements.
• Thrive in a fast-paced environment, owning performance initiatives from inception through implementation and continuous iteration.

Your Required Experience 

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering or performance engineering, with a strong focus on testing and optimizing distributed cloud-native systems.
• Proven track record in building and executing performance testing strategies in complex, large-scale environments.
• Strong programming and scripting skills in Python (preferred), along with experience using performance tools like JMeter, Locust, or similar.
• Expertise in performance profiling, diagnostics, and tuning across microservices architectures.
• Deep understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), Kubernetes orchestration, and cloud-native service architectures.
• Hands-on experience with observability and monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry etc.
• Strong knowledge of CI/CD systems and infrastructure automation, including Gitlab, Jenkins or similar.
• Experience with Java JVM tuning, Golang profiling is a plus.
• Excellent analytical, debugging, and troubleshooting skills at the system and application levels.
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to influence architecture and drive performance culture across engineering.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Experience in chaos engineering, fault injection, and resilience testing.
• Familiarity with capacity planning, system tuning, and infrastructure sizing for cloud-native applications.
• Strong knowledge of database performance, caching strategies, and distributed systems principles.
• Prior experience leading performance initiatives in multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud environments.

The Team

Why Cortex Cloud?

• Market Leader – Be part of the fastest-growing cloud security platform, trusted by leading organizations around the globe, and help ensure its quality scales with its success.
• Innovative Culture – Collaborate with top minds in cybersecurity and automation, where your ideas for smarter, faster, and more secure testing will be valued and implemented.
• Massive Impact – Your work as an SDET will directly contribute to protecting the world’s most critical digital assets by ensuring our solutions are secure, stable, and production-ready.
• Rapid Growth – Join a high-velocity team where career growth and impact go hand in hand. As we scale, you'll have opportunities to take ownership, lead initiatives, and grow your technical expertise.

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 $147,000 - $237,500/ 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.