Sr. Forward Deployed Engineer (Customer Engineering, Prisma AIRS)

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks®, we’re united by a shared mission—to protect our digital way of life. We thrive at the intersection of innovation and impact, solving real-world problems with cutting-edge technology and bold thinking. Here, everyone has a voice, and every idea counts. If you’re ready to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who are just as passionate as you are, you’re in the right place.

Who We Are

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.

Job Summary

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.

Key Responsibilities

• 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.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• 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 & Stra