Senior / Principal Backend Engineer – AppSec Platform (Cortex Cloud)

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

Job Summary

Cortex Cloud Application Security (AppSec) is building the security platform for the modern software development lifecycle. We help organizations identify, prioritize, and prevent security risks across source code, open-source dependencies, infrastructure as code, secrets, container images, CI/CD pipelines, and the broader developer ecosystem.

At the heart of AppSec is a large-scale platform responsible for connecting to customers' development environments, collecting and processing massive amounts of data, and making it reliably available to security products and experiences across Cortex Cloud.

We are looking for an exceptional Senior / Principal Backend Engineer to join our AppSec Platform group, reporting directly to the Group Leader.

This is a highly autonomous, hands-on role for an engineer who wants broad technical ownership rather than a narrowly defined domain. You will work on some of AppSec's most important and challenging engineering problems — spanning high-scale distributed systems, data infrastructure, onboarding and integrations, developer experience, reliability, performance, and AI-driven engineering.

You will frequently operate across team boundaries, take ambiguous problems from idea to production, and lead technical initiatives that have an impact well beyond a single service or team.

We are looking for someone who combines deep backend expertise with strong execution: an engineer who can design the architecture, dive into the code, debug production systems, challenge existing assumptions, rapidly prototype new approaches, and bring others along with them.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead Critical Initiatives End-to-End — Own complex, business-critical engineering efforts from problem definition and architecture through implementation and production, often spanning multiple teams and domains.
• Build and Scale the Backbone of AppSec — Design and evolve distributed systems and data infrastructure supporting large enterprise environments and hundreds of millions of entities, while balancing scalability, reliability, performance, and cost.
• Stay Hands-On and Raise the Engineering Bar — Write and review production code, solve complex technical problems, and champion excellent architecture, maintainable code, testing, observability, and production ownership.
• Drive Performance & Reliability — Identify architectural and operational bottlenecks and lead meaningful improvements in scalability, resiliency, efficiency, observability, and production readiness.
• Shape DevEx and AI-Driven Engineering — Improve how engineers build, test, debug, and operate software while leveraging AI, automation, and agentic approaches to accelerate development and unlock new capabilities.
  
  

Qualifications

• 6+ years of hands-on backend software engineering experience, with demonstrated ownership of complex production systems.
• Proven experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
• Strong backend development skills in one or more modern languages such as TypeScript/Node.js, Go, Python, Java, or similar.
• Strong experience with cloud-native architectures, preferably on GCP or AWS.
• Hands-on experience with SQL and NoSQL databases and the ability to reason about data modeling, indexing, query performance, scalability, and operational trade-offs.
• Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools as a meaningful part of the development workflow, combined with the engineering judgment to validate generated solutions and understand their trade-offs.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence technical decisions across teams and disciplines.
• B.Sc. in Computer Science or an equivalent technical field, or equivalent practical / military experience.
  
  

Advantages

• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, microservices, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, such as Terraform, Pulumi, or similar technologies.
• Experience optimizing high-throughput or data-intensive production systems for performance and cost.
• Experience building AI-powered features, agents, or agentic workflows.
  
  

Our Commitment

We’re trailblazers that dream big, take risks, and challenge cybersecurity’s status quo. It’s simple: we can’t accomplish our mission without diverse teams innovating, together.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for all qualified individuals with a disability. If you require assistance or accommodation due to a disability or special need, please contact us at [email protected].

Palo Alto Networks is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity in our workplace, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or other legally protected characteristics.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Is role eligible for Immigration Sponsorship? No. Please note that we will not sponsor applicants for work visas for this position.