Principal Engineer Software (DLP Life Cycle (SDLC)

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 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 Description

We are seeking a Principal Engineer to own and revolutionize our engineering velocity and developer experience. This is a high-impact, cross-functional role designed to optimize the entire Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) from a developer's first line of code to production deployment.
You will be the principal architect and owner of the tools, processes, and systems that all other engineers at the company rely on.

Your core mission is to make our engineering team more productive, our systems more reliable, and our feedback loops faster. A key strategic component of this role is the research, evaluation, and integration of AI-powered tools to create a step-function improvement in all aspects of our development.

This role is located at our dynamic Santa Clara California headquarters campus and in the office 3 days a week.

Your Impact

1. Build & Environment

• Local Development: Design, automate, and maintain a seamless, containerized local development environment to ensure developers can be productive within minutes.
• Build Systems: Own and optimize all build scripts and infrastructure. Your primary metrics for success will be reducing build time, minimizing cost, and achieving near-perfect reliability.
• Dependency Management: Architect and automate our dependency management strategy to ensure secure, reproducible, and fast resolution of all third-party libraries.

2. Performance & Security

• Performance Optimization: Drive deep technical optimizations at the compiler and architectural levels to improve application performance. Implement and manage company-wide profiling tools and best practices.
• Security Hardening: Embed security into the SDLC. Integrate and manage Static Analysis (SAST) and other security tools within the build process to harden our applications from the ground up.

3. Test & Quality Automation

• Test Automation Framework: Own the strategy and infrastructure for all test automation, including Unit, Component, Integration, and Functional tests.
• Test Metrics: Define and report on key quality metrics, including Test Coverage, reliability (flakiness), and execution time.
• Failure Triage: Act as the primary owner for build and test failures. You will oversee the process of diagnosing failures, identifying the root cause, and ensuring the correct engineering team provides a timely fix.

4. CI/CD & Reporting

• Deployment Automation: Own, simplify, and secure the Continuous Deployment (CD) pipeline, enabling engineering teams to release features safely, autonomously, and frequently.
• Metrics & Reporting: Develop and maintain dashboards that provide clear visibility into engineering health, including code coverage, build times, test flakiness, and deployment frequency.

5. AI Tooling Integration

• Strategic AI Implementation: Act as the team's subject matter expert on AI-driven development tools.
• Prototyping & Integration: Continuously research, prototype, and integrate AI tooling to enhance all of the above responsibilities. This includes, but is not limited to:
  • AI-assisted code generation and refactoring.
  • Intelligent test case generation.
  • Automated bug detection and remediation.
  • AI-powered pipeline optimization and security analysis.

Qualifications

Your Experience 

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with a demonstrable focus on DevOps, Developer Experience (DevEx), or Build/Tools/Platform Engineering.
• Expert-l