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.
Who We Are
We weave AI into the fabric of everything we do and use it to augment the impact every individual can have. Most teams work from the office full time, with flexibility when needed.
The Team
Cortex Platform - Cortex is the industry's only open and integrated, AI-based, continuous security platform. Cortex is a significant evolution of the Application Framework designed to simplify security operations and considerably improve outcomes. Deployed on a global, scalable public cloud platform, Cortex allows security operations teams to speed the analysis of massive data sets.
Job Summary
As a Distinguished Engineer for the Cortex Platform, you will serve as a key technical leader driving the innovation, development, and scaling of our industry-leading cybersecurity products, including Cortex Cloud, XSOAR, XDR, and XSIAM. You will architect shared infrastructures and tackle complex backend challenges to deliver exceptional value to thousands of enterprise customers. Leveraging AI-native architectures and cloud technologies, you will optimize data processing pipelines and distributed systems. This role requires a visionary approach and a passion for solving the world's most critical cybersecurity threats.
Key Responsibilities
•Drive long-term technical vision and architecture for critical Cortex platforms and services.
•Design highly scalable, secure, and cost-efficient distributed systems for processing massive data volumes.
•Serve as a technical leader, providing consultation and collaborating across engineering teams to ensure alignment.
•Lead cross-team architecture decisions, balancing scalability, performance, operational complexity, and engineering velocity.
•Architect and optimize cloud-native infrastructure, data pipelines, distributed storage, and real-time analytics platforms.
•Own and resolve complex technical challenges spanning multiple services, teams, and cybersecurity products.
•Drive adoption of AI-native architectures, agentic AI, and intelligent automation across engineering workflows.
•Identify opportunities to apply AI to accelerate development, testing, troubleshooting, and overall operational efficiency.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications
•Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.
•14+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a focus on distributed, cloud-native application development.
•Expert-level programming skills in Python, Go, with proven experience building large-scale distributed systems.
•Strong understanding of computer science fundamentals, including concurrency, networking, operating systems, databases, and storage systems.
•Extensive experience with cloud development, including REST APIs, databases, serverless computing, and microservices architectures.
•Demonstrated experience as a hands-on technical lead or architect on complex software projects.
•Experience architecting or implementing AI/ML-powered systems and familiarity with modern LLM-based technologies.
•Exceptional technical judgment, communication, collaboration, and the ability to influence senior technical and business leaders.
Preferred Qualifications
•8+ years of hands-on experience with specific cloud technologies such as ElasticSearch, Google Pub/Sub, or similar.
•Deep understanding of public cloud design considerations, including security, global network infrastructure, and load balancing.
•Proven ability to make data-driven trade-off judgments and excellent troubleshooting skills to isolate and resolve complex issues.
•Experience working in an agile environment with cross-functional teams to deliver full-stack products at scale.
•Familiarity with security operations, threat detection, cloud security posture management, and cyber security fundamentals.
Compensation Disclosure
The compensation offered for this position will depend on qualifications, experience, and work location. For candidates who receive an offer at the posted level, the starting base salary (for non-sales roles) or base salary + commission target (for sales/commissioned roles) is expected to be the annual range listed below. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus.
$248,700.00 - $341,250.00/yr
Is role eligible for Immigration Sponsorship?: Yes
