Principal Software Engineer (Network 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.

FLEXWORK is an employee-centric reimagining of how we work. We built FLEXWORK based on employee feedback – it is about flexibility, trust, and choice whenever possible. It’s been a journey of disruption that has yielded the best of our values. We offer as much flexibility as possible, and choices that enable you to be most productive, including benefits that meet your needs and learning opportunities that you feel passionate about.

Our Approach to Work

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
We're seeking innovators - engineers who seek to design new products, designing state-of-the-art products that do not exist today. These engineers love to code with a drive to build global products and bring new ideas to develop security disciplines to solve real-world problems. We are looking for leaders who take ownership of their areas of focus and who are driven to pursue problems at every level. Collaboration is at the heart of our culture and we need engineers who can communicate at a high level and work well with multi-functional teams towards achieving a common goal.
As a member of Layer-7 Application Security group, you will be responsible for designing and developing security features on the next-generation firewall platform and our security services cloud. You will work with product management on user requirement, apply your knowledge to functional design, utilize your programming skills for efficient and robust implementation, and interact with quality assurance and field support teams throughout the entire software development cycle.
Your Impact

• You will be expected to participate in all phases of the product development cycle, from definition, design, through implementation and test
• Develop functional specifications, assess task requirements and scheduling, and participate in development, debug and support
•  Candidate should also have hands-on experience with networking or network security technologies and C language development in a Unix/Linux environment
•  Suggest and implement improvements to the development process
•  Be able to clearly communicate goals and desired outcomes to internal project teams
•  Interview, mentor and coach new team members

Qualifications

Your Experience

• Proficient in C and familiar with Unix/Linux development environment
• Working knowledge of TCP/IP internal
• Working knowledge of common data structure and algorithms
• Verbal and written communication skills to work with cross-functional groups
• Team player with a can-do attitude in a dynamic working environment

Preferred Qualifications

• Advance level of software development experience
• Graduate degree (MS or PhD) in Computer Science or similar technical discipline
• Knowledge of multi-core / multi-process / multi-threaded programming
• Experience with network packet processing software development, 7 - 10 years
• Experience with and interest to learn other programming languages
• Experience with large-scale and/or high-performance software design and development
• Experience with deep packet inspection engine
• Experience with DNS at the protocol level
• Experience with other application layer protocols such as HTTP, SMTP, SIP, etc.
• Experience with GoLang

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 the products and services that proactively address them. Our engineering team is at the core of our products – connected directly to the mission of preventing cyberattacks. They are