Senior Performance Engineer - Server (Cortex Platform)

Company Description

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks® everything starts and ends with our mission:

Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.
Our vision is a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. We are a company built on the foundation of challenging and disrupting the way things are done, and we’re looking for innovators who are as committed to shaping the future of cybersecurity as we are.

Who We Are

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

Your Career

If you’re a highly technical person who loves performance engineering, we’d love to have you join our innovative Cortex Server Performance team as a Senior Performance Engineer.

Our team is responsible for all performance aspects of Cortex, developing, maintaining, and executing various performance tests to ensure our products are stable, scalable, and meet our SLA. As a Senior Performance Engineer, you will work on the Cortex platform, serving many teams and customers. You will diagnose and solve performance-related issues in a highly challenging product at a massive scale. Additionally, you will collaborate closely with different engineering teams to enhance performance test coverage and modernize our approach by heavily automating workflows and integrating smart analytical tools.

Your Impact

Architect the Automation: You won't just use tools; you will build them. Architect and maintain sophisticated, reusable Python-based automation frameworks and internal tooling that power our entire performance testing ecosystem for the Cortex platform.

Take a hands-on approach to diagnosing complex performance issues across the full stack (Kubernetes, application code, databases, network).

Design and implement high-scale load simulations that push our cloud infrastructure to its limits, ensuring stability under extreme conditions.

AI-Driven Analysis: Move beyond manual log crunching. Proactively leverage AI-driven analytics and GenAI tools (e.g., for log summarization, anomaly detection on metrics) to accelerate root cause analysis of complex bottlenecks in a massive-scale distributed system.

Collaborate closely with various engineering groups throughout the product development lifecycle, from requirements to release.

Qualifications

Your Experience

5+ years of experience in performance engineering, with a deep understanding of system internals, concurrency, and distributed architecture concepts.

Advanced Python proficiency. You have a strong portfolio of building automation systems, data analysis tools, or custom made performance testing frameworks from scratch (beyond just writing simple scripts).

A proven track record of adopting new technologies to work smarter. Specifically, we are looking for experience leveraging AI/LLM tools within your engineering workflow - whether for accelerating coding, analyzing vast datasets for anomalies, generating test scenarios, or summarizing complex root causes.

Hands-on experience debugging and tuning applications running on Kubernetes at scale. You know how to interpret container metrics and understand k8s scheduling impacts on performance.

Deep experience with monitoring stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, etc.) and modern load testing tools (Locust is preferred).

Excellent communication and interpersonal skills in both Hebrew and English, with the ability to explain complex technical data to varied audiences.

Ability to work independently in a fast-paced environment and as a collaborative part of a team.

Additional Information

The Team

Our engineering team is at the core of our products and connected directly to the mission of preventing cyberattacks. We are constantly innovating — challenging the way we, and the industry, think about cybersecurity. Our engineers don’t shy away from building products to solve problems no one has pursued before.

We define the industry instead of waiting for directions. We need individuals who feel comfortable in ambiguity, excited by the prospect of a challenge, and empowered by the unknown risks facing our everyday lives that are only enabled by a secure digital environment.

Our Commitment

We’re problem solvers that 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 accommodations@paloaltonetworks.com.

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.