Principal Software Engineer (Cortex Platform)

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 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 Description

Your Career

We are looking for a Principal Backend Engineer to join our Cortex backend engineering group.

The group develops and maintains the backend of Cortex products - Cortex XSOAR, Cortex XDR, and Cortex XSIAM. You will join a team focused on developing, innovating, and scaling the Cortex Platform, along with contributing to shared Cortex infrastructures and components. We are looking for candidates with a can-do attitude who are passionate about complex problems and thrive on bringing value to thousands of customers.

Your Impact

• End-to-end backend development of features and components across their entire life cycle (design, develop, test, deploy, maintain)  
• Work closely with peers across different teams and disciplines to shape solutions and integrate with other parts of the product
• Contribute to team-wide efforts - code reviews, design reviews, technical and architectural decisions.
• Production-oriented approach with providing real-time mitigation and solutions to production issues.

Qualifications

Your Experience

• M.S/B.S degree in Computer Science or equivalent and 8+ years of software engineering experience, including development of a scalable server-side application
• Extensive hands-on programming skills in Go and/or Python
• Strong computer science fundamentals (e.g. understanding of lock-free data structures, bloom filters, minimal perfect hashing, consistent hashing etc)
• Proven Experience with cloud platforms (e.g. GCP / AWS / Azure)
• Experience with Microservices architecture (Kubernetes, GKE, EKS, AKS, Docker, Serverless, etc)
• Experience with big–data architectures (using Kafka, Splunk, Flink, etc)
• Experience with distributed computing (understand implications of CAP theorem, master election, brain split problem) and/or distributed DB/KVP (BigQuery, Elastic Search, Kafka and SingleStore)
• Hands-on experience with SQL/NoSQL based databases
• Experience working in an agile and dynamic environment High energy and the ability to work in a fast-paced environment with a can-do attitude
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and cloud infra
• Familiarity with Cyber Technologies, Information Security, and Software Security

Additional Information

The Team

To stay ahead of the curve, it’s critical to know where the curve is and how to anticipate the changes we’re facing. For the fastest-growing cybersecurity company, the curve is the evolution of cyberattacks and access technologies, and the products and services dedicated to addressing them. Our engineering team is at the core of our products – connected directly to the mission of preventing cyberattacks and enabling secure access to all on-prem and cloud applications. They are constantly innovating – challenging the way we, and the industry, think about Access and security. These engineers aren’t shy about building products to solve problems no one has pursued before. They define the industry rather than waiting for directions. We need individuals who feel comfortable with ambiguity, are excited by the prospect of challenge, and are empowered by the unknown risks in our everyday lives, enabled only by a secure digital environment.

Our engineering team has an unrivaled opportunity to create the products and practices that will support our company's growth over the next decade, defining the cybersecurity industry as we know it. If you see the potential of how incredible people and products can transform a business, this is the team for you.   If the prospect of affecting tens of millions of people, enabling them to work remotely securely and easily in ways never done before, thrills you, you belong with us.

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 + c