Sr Principal Engineer Software (AI Security)

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

With Prisma AIRS, Palo Alto Networks is building the world's most comprehensive AI security platform. Organizations are increasingly building complex ecosystems of AI models, applications, and agents, creating dynamic new attack surfaces with risks that traditional security approaches cannot address. In response, Prisma AIRS delivers model security, posture management, AI red teaming, and runtime protection. Our customers can confidently deploy AI-driven innovation while ensuring a formidable security posture from development through runtime.

We are looking for a highly skilled and experienced Senior Principal Engineer to join the Prisma AIRS to play a crucial part in designing, developing, and optimizing robust, scalable, and high-performance backend systems that power our cutting-edge AI security platform.

This role is located at our dynamic Seattle WA office - in office 3 days a week. This is not a remote role. 

Your Impact

• Define and drive the technical vision and long-term strategy for multiple complex, highly distributed backend systems.
• Lead the end-to-end architecture and design of innovative, cross-functional product initiatives, ensuring solutions are scalable, reliable, and secure for a global enterprise.
• Influence technical and product roadmaps by collaborating with senior leaders, product managers, and engineers across multiple organizations.
• Serve as a hands-on technical leader, providing mentorship and raising the technical bar for other senior and staff-level engineers, fostering a culture of engineering excellence.
• Pioneer and evangelize best practices for software development, operational excellence, and architectural patterns that impact entire product lines.

Qualifications

Your Experience 

• Deep and proven experience (12+ years) of architecting, building, and launching complex, large-scale distributed systems with significant business impact.
• Expert-level proficiency in modern Python or at least one strongly typed programming language such as Go, Java, or C++.
• Deep expertise in modern cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) with a track record of building highly scalable and resilient cloud-native applications.
• Demonstrable experience operating mission-critical systems in production with stringent SLAs, including on-call leadership and incident response.
• Extensive experience with Kubernetes and the cloud-native ecosystem, including a deep understanding of its internals and operational best practices.
• Experience with machine learning (ML/MLOps), security, or data engineering would be a significant advantage.
• Exceptional communication and presentation skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and possess the ability to drive clarity and alignment on tec