Senior Principal Engineer (Cortex Xpanse)

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

The Xpanse ASM feature teams are expanding, and we’re looking for a Senior Principal  Software Engineer. 

Xpanse helps protect some of the world’s most important organizations by finding risks on the Internet that no one else can find. Our product engineering teams are responsible for building the user-facing security products that allow customers to turn trillions of Internet data points into critical cybersecurity insights. 

Your Impact

As a Senior Principal Engineer on a feature team, you will:

• Work regularly across teams as an acknowledged technical leader in the organization
• Drive projects from requirements to complete design and implementation as project lead or mentor thereof
• Lead efforts to align planned work across the product in collaboration with product management, UX design, and fellow engineering stakeholders
• 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
• Mentor engineers across the department
• Regularly provide cross-team technical collaboration and consultation
• Design, build, and optimize data models and queries for speed and scale, using data storage technologies like MySQL and BigQuery
• Design and build business logic and API endpoints using Python and Flask
• Build user interfaces using Angular

Your Experience

• 8+ years of industry experience as a professional software engineer building customer-facing software for a SaaS business
• Extensive experience providing technical leadership within and across teams building enterprise features on a multi-tenant SaaS platform at scale (examples - role-based access, SAML integrations, feature flag frameworks)
• Excitement to dig in, prototype, build, test, and see projects through to production
• Ability to balance shipping new products and features with addressing technical debt and investments in architecture and infrastructure
• Expert knowledge and informed opinions on at least one of
  • Databases, data modeling, profiling, and performance optimization
  • Methods and tradeoffs for handling concurrency
  • API design and distributed backend systems
• Extensive knowledge of Python
• Knowledge of GCP (a plus but not required)

The Team

In this role, you will be an integral part of the group that enables customers to engage with their data through our web application. You will work across teams to architect solutions to some of our most challenging technical problems, then lead projects to implement them, including designing and building data models, APIs, and user interfaces for user-facing features. You will draw upon your experience to rapidly investigate and prototype new functionality, then switch to implementation mode to deliver products. You will guide and mentor your team in enterprise software development, architecture and technical design, and the evaluation thereof. You will represent your team in technical roadmap planning and cross-team design review sessions, working regularly with senior engineers from other teams, UX designers, and product managers.

Your expertise will help define and secure the perimeters of the world's most important organizations. 

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 $170000 - $277000/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.

Is role eligible for Immigration Sponsorship?: Yes