Principal Engineer Software

Our Mission At Palo Alto Networksu00ae, weu2019re united by a shared missionu2014to 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 youu2019re ready to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who are just as passionate as you are, youu2019re 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. Thatu2019s why most of our teams work from the office full time, with flexibility when itu2019s needed. This model supports real-time problem-solving, stronger relationships, and the kind of precision that drives great outcomes. Job Summary 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 Impact1. Build & EnvironmentLocal 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 & SecurityPerformance 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 AutomationTest 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 & ReportingDeployment 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 IntegrationStrategic 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 telligent test case generation.Automated bug detection and remediation.AI-powered pipeline optimization and security analysis. Qualifications Your Experience10+ years of experience in software engineering, with a demonstrable focus on DevOps, Developer Experience (DevEx), or Build/Tools/Platform Engineering.Expert-level knowledge of CI/CD systems (e.g., GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI) and build automation tools (e.g., Bazel, Gradle, Make, Webpack).Strong systems-level programming skills and experience with compiler-level optimization and performance profiling.Deep experience with test automation frameworks and a strong understanding of the

Created: 2026-02-16