Sr Staff Engineer Software (ADEM - Autonomous Digital Experience Management)

Company Description

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.

Job Description

Your Career

Palo Alto Networks' ADEM (Autonomous Digital Experience Management) group is seeking an accomplished Senior Staff Software Engineer with expertise in developing client-side software for Windows and macOS. You will be part of a world-class engineering team working on innovative solutions in the ADEM domain, focusing on building robust, efficient, and scalable agents for monitoring and enhancing digital experiences. You will collaborate with a multi-functional team of engineers to design and develop software systems that address complex challenges in the ADEM space, driving performance and reliability across diverse environments.

Your Impact

• Responsible for complete software development process including requirement analysis, design, development, deployment, and support

• Collaborate with other cross functional teams in order to create tight integrations of product features and infrastructure

• Write clean, testable, readable, scalable and maintainable code that scales and performs well for thousands of customers

• Participate actively and be a factor to design and development discussions

• Identify areas for improvement within the team and actively push for positive change through new initiatives or optimizations

Qualifications

Your Experience 

• 6+ years of solid experience in programming, design, and development, with a focus on client-side software for Windows and macOS.

• Strong understanding of system-level programming, including OS-specific features, file systems, and inter-process communication.

• Extensive hands-on (expert level) programming skills in C++, C#, Objective-C, or Swift, with experience building and optimizing desktop applications for Windows, macOS and Linux platforms.

• Proven expertise in developing cross-platform software solutions, including experience with native SDKs for Windows and macOS.

• Experience in building multithreaded, concurrent, and performance-optimized applications, with a focus on reliability and low resource consumption.

• Strong understanding of network protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP/HTTPS), socket programming, and VPN technologies.

• Familiarity with software deployment, auto-update mechanisms, and version management on client devices.

• Knowledge of telemetry data collection, including logs, metrics, and traces, and integration with client-side observability tools.

• Experience in designing intuitive user interfaces and seamless background processes, ensuring minimal disruption to end-user activities.

• Exposure to CI/CD pipelines and tooling specific to desktop application development (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD), and automated testing frameworks for Windows and macOS.

• Strong knowledge of system security, including encryption, secure communication, a