Senior Principal Engineer (Cortex Xpanse)

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.

Our Approach to Work

We lead with flexibility and choice in all of our people programs. We have disrupted the traditional view that all employees have the same needs and wants. We offer personalization and offer our employees the opportunity to choose what works best for them as often as possible - from your wellbeing support to your growth and development, and beyond!

At Palo Alto Networks, we believe in the power of collaboration and value in-person interactions. This is why our employees generally work from the office three days per week, leaving two days for choice and flexibility to work where you feel most effective. This setup fosters casual conversations, problem-solving, and trusted relationships. While details may evolve, our goal is to create an environment where innovation thrives, with office-based teams coming together three days a week to collaborate and thrive, together!

Job Description

Your Career

The Xpanse ASM feature teams are expanding, and we’re looking for a Senior Principal  Software Engineer. 

Xpanse helps protect some of the world’s most important organizations by finding risks on the Internet that no one else can find. Our product engineering teams are responsible for building the user-facing security products that allow customers to turn trillions of Internet data points into critical cybersecurity insights. 

Your Impact

As a Principal Engineer on a feature team, you will:

• Work regularly across teams as an acknowledged technical leader in the organization

• Drive projects from requirements to complete design and implementation as project lead or mentor thereof

• Lead efforts to align planned work across the product in collaboration with product management, UX design, and fellow engineering stakeholders

• Utilize your big-picture perspective to spot existing and impending problems, then work with senior engineers and leadership across the department to analyze and solve them

• Proactively spot, articulate, and mitigate risks in ongoing and planned projects to ensure smooth execution and high output. This may include providing ad hoc mentorship, communicating with project stakeholders, or rolling up your sleeves and stepping in to help move things along

• Mentor engineers across the department

• Regularly provide cross-team technical collaboration and consultation

• Design, build, and optimize data models and queries for speed and scale, using data storage technologies like MySQL and BigQuery

• Design and build business logic and API endpoints using Python and Flask

• Build user interfaces using Angular

Qualifications

Your Experience

A strong candidate for this role should have:

• 8+ years of industry experience as a professional software engineer building customer-facing software for a SaaS business

• Extensive experience providing technical leadership within and across teams building enterprise features on a multi-tenant SaaS platform at scale (examples: role-based access, SAML integrations, feature flag frameworks)

• Excitement to dig in, prototype, build, test, and see projects through to production

• Ability to balance shipping new products and features with addressing technical debt and investments in architecture and infrastructure

• Expert knowledge and informed opinions on at least one of:

  • Databases, data modeling, profiling, and performance optimization

  • Methods and tradeoffs for handling concurrency

  • API design and distributed backend systems

• Extensive knowledge of Python

• Knowledge of GCP (a plus but not required)

Additional Information

The Team

In this role, you will be an integral part of the group that enables customers to engage with their data through our web application. You will work across teams to architect solutions to some of our most challenging technical problems, then lead projects to implement them, including designing and building data models, APIs, and user interfaces for user-facing features. You will draw upon your experience to rapidly investigate and prototype new functionali