Principal Software Engineer - Backend - Python (Xpanse)

Company Description

To comply with U.S. federal government requirements, U.S. citizenship is required for this position

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

We’re looking for an experienced Data Engineer Developer to join the Cyber Research Engineering team at Cortex.

Cyber Research Engineering is a cross-functional team composed of people with backgrounds at the nexus of software engineering, data analysis, threat hunt, and national security. We're responsible for performing rapid prototyping and special projects using unique datasets to deliver cybersecurity insights for government, military, and commercial customers. We have several key responsibilities:

• Operations - We collect data, perform specialized scanning, and provide provides advanced vulnerability testing
• Analytics - We analyze threat intelligence, performs APT Threat Hunting, and conduct research projects tailored to the special needs public sector customers
• Software Development - We builds tools for technical users, create prototypes for unique public sector use cases, and maintain/add features to our established cyber intelligence products

The work of the Cyber Research Engineering team is varied, exciting, and meaningful. We leverage endpoint and boundary devices, network traffic, internet scanning, malware sandboxes and many other datasets ranging in size from terabytes to petabytes. We encourage engineers and researchers to use these datasets in unconventional ways to produce unparalleled cybersecurity products and insights about computer networks that allow customers to better hunt those individuals who try to abuse those networks.

Your Impact

We’re looking for a data engineer to join the Cyber Research team at Xpanse, the latest addition to Palo Alto Networks Cortex. At Xpanse, you will:

• Help bring a new threat intelligence product to market
• Design and implement methods to store, query, and analyze datasets ranging in size from gigabytes to petabytes in unconventional ways to produce unparalleled cybersecurity insights
• Develop novel techniques and approaches for understanding the Internet and characterizing data for insights relevant to cyber threat intelligence
• Empower threat intelligence analysts at Palo Alto and its customers to counter bad actors across the internet

Qualifications

Your Experience

• 6+ years of experience as a professional software engineer or data engineer for a SaaS business
• Extensive experience in developing data-driven applications using Python
• Strong familiarity with databases, data modeling, profiling, and performance optimization
• Familiarity with search and retrieval problems over large datasets, including database query optimization
• Excited to work closely with analysts to build a toolkit for discovering and tracking APT campaigns across the internet
• High-level understanding of computer networks, protocols, and how the Internet works

Nice to have

• Professional experience designing and implementing solutions for large-scale data storage and analysis, using tools such as Google BigQuery, ClickHouse, Google BigTable, Apache HBase, or ElasticSearch
• Experience developing and maintaining stream-processing pipelines using Apache Apache Beam or Apache Spark
• Familiarity with ETL management tools, such as Apache Airflow
• Background or