Staff Software Development Engineer in Test- SDET - hybrid

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

We’re looking for a Staff SDET to help us elevate performance testing as a core Quality practice across our cloud-native platform and self-hosted platform.

You’ll act as a Quality and Performance Engineer who builds tooling, frameworks and infrastructure that development teams trust and adopt. Performance is a key focus of this role – but it is one aspect of a broader mission: enabling teams to build scalable, reliable and production-ready systems.

Performance requirements are often implicit or under-defined – part of your role to help define what needs to be tested and how it should be measured.

This role sits within our Scale, Performance and Integrations Team and implies close collaboration with development teams, and other SDETs acting as Quality champions.

What You’ll Do

You will have the opportunity to:

• Implement and evolve performance and reliability tests

• Collaborate with other development teams to apply an existing performance testing direction and build upon it over time

• Build and maintain performance test components for load generation, ramp-up and steady-state testing, result collection and analysis

• Execute performance tests in CI/CD pipelines and support their integration into regular development workflows

• Use observability tools to analyze, visualize, and communicate performance results, including latency distributions, throughput, and error rates

• Store, track, and compare performance results over time to help identify regressions and trends

• Assist in emulating realistic customer environments, including networking, certificate-based flows, and multi-service interactions

• Partner with development teams to help them understand performance test results and improve system behavior under load

• Design and execute comprehensive tests utilizing application APIs.

#LI-KR1 #LI-Hybrid

Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience in test automation, SDET, performance engineering, or backend engineering roles, with a strong testing focus

• Strong coding skills in Go, or Python (Python preferred)

• Practical understanding of:

  • Performance testing types: baseline, load, stress, soak etc.

  • Load patterns (steady, ramp-up, spike, soak) and which scenarios they map to

  • Core performance metrics (p50/p90/p99 latency, throughput, error rates)

  • Setting performance goals

• Experience working with observability platforms to analyze and visualize performance data, such as: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog (or similar tools)

• Demonstrated experience with VMware vCenter and the pyVmomi SDK.

• Strong troubleshooting skills to diagnose test failures and fix flaky tests to ensure reliable CI/CD pipelines.

• Ability to analyze system behavior and determine performance bottlenecks.

• Familiarity with virtual machines, con