Principal Software Engineer (L7 Security)

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks®, we’re united by a shared mission—to protect our digital way of life. We thrive at the intersection of innovation and impact, solving real-world problems with cutting-edge technology and bold thinking. Here, everyone has a voice, and every idea counts. If you’re ready to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who are just as passionate as you are, you’re in the right place.

Who We Are

In order to be the cybersecurity partner of choice, we must trailblaze the path and shape the future of our industry. This is something our employees work at each day and is defined by our values: Disruption, Collaboration, Execution, Integrity, and Inclusion. We weave AI into the fabric of everything we do and use it to augment the impact every individual can have. If you are passionate about solving real-world problems and ideating beside the best and the brightest, we invite you to join us!

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 Summary

The Team

Engineering - Our engineering team is at the core of our products and connected directly to the mission of preventing cyberattacks. We are constantly innovating — challenging the way we, and the industry, think about cybersecurity. Our engineers don’t shy away from building products to solve problems no one has pursued before. We define the industry instead of waiting for directions. We need individuals who feel comfortable in ambiguity, excited by the prospect of a challenge, and empowered by the unknown risks facing our everyday lives that are only enabled by a secure digital environment.

Job Summary

This is a high-impact, heavy-hitting Principal Software Engineer role within the Layer-7 Security Software team (highly indicative of Palo Alto Networks' core engineering group). The individual will drive the technical leadership and end-to-end delivery of high-scale, distributed cloud security solutions and next-generation firewalls (NGFW). This team is the literal engine room of the company’s revenue, responsible for core capabilities like Application Identification (App-ID) and Content Inspection across hardware, virtual, container, and cloud environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership for the end-to-end delivery of solutions, ensuring alignment with cross-functional product management and quality assurance teams.

• Design, implement, and troubleshoot robust next-generation cloud security solutions to address complex network security challenges.

• Drive the development of scalable cloud security architecture through hands-on coding and strategic architectural planning.

• Manage the full product development lifecycle, from definition and design through implementation, testing, and deployment.

• Collaborate proactively with Product Management, SRE, and Quality Engineering to deliver high-quality security-as-a-service offerings to market.

• Simplify complex technical issues to improve end-customer outcomes by working closely with customer support teams.

• Foster a culture of innovation, intellectual curiosity, and problem-solving within the engineering organization.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• B.S. degree in Computer Science, similar technical discipline or equivalent practical experience, Graduate degree (MS or Ph.D.) in Computer Science or similar technical discipline is preferred or equivalent military experience required

• 7-10 Years Experience in design and developing scalable solutions in relevant area.

• Experience in C and Python programming.

• Proficient  with Go programming

• Experience with Redis, SQL or NoSQL database

• Experience in Cloud Technologies like Kubernetes, Kafka, MogoDB, Redis etc.

• Experience with HTTP and web server backend development

• Experience with networking development, eg. TCP/UDP, Socket programming

• Experience with multi-threaded programming and large-scale, distributed, and/or high-performance software design and architect

<