Sr Staff Engineer Software

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

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend on the AIRS Runtime team, you will play a key role in designing and building the backend systems that power our AI security platform. You will help architect and implement scalable, high-performance services that enable real-time insights, secure AI workloads, and deliver value to customers worldwide.

This role requires strong technical expertise, deep understanding of distributed systems, and a mindset focused on reliability and performance. You’ll collaborate with frontend, infrastructure, and product engineers to deliver an industry-defining AI runtime security solution — one that sets the standard for how organizations secure AI systems in production.

Your Impact

• Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services for AI runtime security, ensuring high availability and performance.

• Own new features and components from design through deployment, including architecture, testing, and monitoring.

• Collaborate closely with frontend, infrastructure, and product engineers to design clear APIs and data models that power a seamless user experience.

• Drive architectural decisions that improve performance, scalability, and maintainability across services.

• Apply best practices in distributed systems design, observability, and secure-by-design principles.

• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines and automate workflows for build, testing, and deployment.

• Mentor other engineers, fostering growth and technical excellence within the team.

• Research, evaluate, and introduce new technologies and frameworks that strengthen our platform.

Qualifications

Your Experience 

• BS/MS degree in Computer Science or equivalent.

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with strong focus on backend systems.

• Expertise in at least one strongly typed language such as Go (preferred), Java, C#, C++, and/or modern Python (with type hints, Pydantic, etc).

• Proven experience designing and implementing distributed systems and microservices architectures.

• Strong understanding of cloud environments (GCP preferred; AWS or Azure also valuable).

• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitLab, GitHub Actions) and containerized deployments (Docker, Kubernetes).

• Experience with relational and NoSQL databases, caching systems, and message queues.

• Familiarity with security best practices, authentication, and API design.

• Proficient in writing unit, integration, and end-to-end tests to ensure reliability and quality.

• Strong communication and collaboration skills; able to work cross-functionally in a fast-paced environment.

Nice to have:

• Experience building AI or data-intens