Sr Principal/ Performance & Scalability Architect (Idira)

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 Summary

Who We Are

As a Performance Lead in our Centralized Quality Team, you will be the architect of our performance testing ecosystem. You will build the infrastructure and define the AI-driven methodologies that allow our R&D groups to deliver the world's most secure Identity Security platform at massive scale. This is a high-impact role where you will lead the adoption and testing of our performance stack, including tools like LoadRunner, Locust, and JMeter; leveraging GenAI for testing; utilizing observability tools like Dynatrace, New Relic, or Datadog; and operating at scale within AWS and Kubernetes (EKS).

Your Career

• Drive the cross-company performance strategy, shifting from reactive testing to proactive Performance Engineering.
• Develop centralized, reusable performance testing assets and AI-powered dashboards for use by all product teams.
• Use AI to analyze vast amounts of telemetry data, providing actionable insights into architectural weaknesses and cost-optimization opportunities.
• Partner with R&D and Product Leads to ensure performance is integrated into our CI/CD pipelines.
• Lead a performance-aware SDLC process, set KPIs, and work with R&D and Product to ensure new features meet performance demands.
• Incorporate customer requirements into testing cycles for new features and regression suites.

• Bachelor's degree with 12 years of experience, or Master's degree with 8 years of experience, or PhD with 5 years of experience in Performance Engineering.
• Proven leadership with experience leading complex technical projects or teams.
• Expert knowledge of performance testing tools (e.g., LoadRunner, Locust, JMeter).
• Strong hands-on coding proficiency in Java, Python, or Go.
• Experience or deep interest in applying AI/LLMs to automate testing workflows or analyze performance metrics.
• Extensive experience with AWS infrastructure and Kubernetes.
• Experience with AI-driven Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to pinpoint bottlenecks in complex microservices architectures.
• Ability to explain complex performance data to stakeholders and influence R&D roadmaps.

• Experience with AIOps tools and predictive monitoring.
• Active contribution to the performance engineering or AI community (blogs, open source, meetups).