Senior Staff IT Software Engineer

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 Description

The Team

Our Information Technology team at Palo Alto Networks is at the forefront of the digital transformation of our business. We are a team of builders and innovators, creating the technology that empowers our employees to protect our digital way of life. We are responsible for the entire lifecycle of technology at Palo Alto Networks, from the initial idea to the final product. We are looking for people who are passionate about technology and want to make a difference in the world.

• Architect and evolve scalable, highly reliable business systems across multiple services and teams, ensuring robust and future-proof solutions.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards and best practices within an agile development environment to improve quality and velocity.
• Provide technical leadership for complex initiatives by determining project requirements, developing work schedules, and guiding the engineering team.
• Collaborate with product teams to balance technical debt, product stability, and new features against go-to-market pressures and timelines.
• Drive the technical strategy for LLM-powered systems, focusing on context caching, token optimization, and latency reduction.
• Establish evaluation and observability frameworks to measure AI quality (accuracy, hallucination rates) and overall system reliability.
• Mentor staff engineers and challenge engineers at all levels to foster continuous growth and technical excellence within their discipline.
• Effectively represent engineering in cross-functional and leadership discussions, translating complex technical concepts for diverse audiences.

• 10+ years of software development or equivalent experience, with a proven track record of delivering complex systems.
• Expertise in microservices architecture (API, Web, DB, Distributed systems) with experience designing systems at scale.
• Hands-on experience with Java (Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Spring Security), OOPS concepts, and Hibernate.
• Experience building production applications using LLM APIs such as Google Vertex AI/Gemini, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
• Proficiency with RESTful API design patterns and hands-on experience in building and consuming web services.
• Familiarity with vector embeddings, semantic search, and similarity-based retrieval patterns for AI applications.
• Experience with at least one relational (MySQL, PostgreSQL) or NoSQL (MongoDB, Firestore) database.
• Experience developing container-based applications (Kubernetes, Helm) on at least one cloud platform (GCP, AWS, Azure).

• Experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google Cloud Spanner.
• Experience architecting conversational AI platforms, chatbots, or Text-to-SQL systems.
• Knowledge of multi-turn dialogue management, conversation history patterns, and prompt engineering best practices.
• Background in TypeScript/Node.js for AI agent development.