Senior Staff Engineer Software

Palo Alto Networks as a Senior Staff Software Engineer, where you will lead the architectural evolution and technical direction of our platform. You will tackle high-ambiguity technical challenges, set the engineering vision, and pioneer AI-first development workflows. Your responsibilities will include end-to-end feature delivery, leading AI-first engineering practices, architecting for scale and extensibility, practicing defensive and secure engineering, simplifying workflows, ensuring production service excellence, and fostering team capability and knowledge sharing. You will have a significant impact on our technical strategy and engineering culture.

Responsibilities

• Drive end-to-end feature delivery by taking complete ownership of complex features, breaking down work, managing commitments, and systematically reducing cycle time and rework.
• Lead AI-first engineering practices by applying high AI tool fluency and prompt/context engineering to design AI-assisted workflows across the software development lifecycle.
• Architect for scale and extensibility by designing clear system interfaces and extensible logic that minimize maintainer toil, gracefully handling performance, reliability, and scale trade-offs.
• Cross-Functional Influence: Skilled at aligning with PM, Design, and engineering partners, writing clear RFCs, and mentoring teams without needing formal authority
• Cloud Infrastructure Leadership: Proven track record architecting, deploying, and operating scalable solutions within the AWS ecosystem
• DevOps & Observability Ecosystems: Practical experience with progressive delivery, CI/CD pipelines, feature flagging tools, and modern monitoring frameworks

Requirements

• Full-Stack Mastery: Deep hands-on experience building enterprise-grade applications using the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, Angular, Node.js)
• Production & Operational Ownership: Extensive experience debugging complex production services, driving RCAs, and implementing systemic prevention mechanisms
• AI Tooling & Output Verification: Expertise in prompt and context engineering, utilizing AI tools within software development while exercising peer-review rigor to verify AI outputs for correctness and security
• Navigating Ambiguity: Demonstrated ability to remain highly productive through fluid requirements, adapting technical tactics while maintaining alignment with business goals
• System Design & Extensibility: Strong foundation in designing clean APIs, refactoring complex code bases, and making explicit architectural trade-offs for long-term scalability
• Modern Frontend & Quality Tooling: Fluency in TypeScript along with automated testing frameworks such as Jest, Playwright, or JMeter for load and stress testing

Preferred

• Context Engineering & Retrieval: Experience structuring codebase documentation and architecture for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and reusable prompt templating
• Identity & Access Security Domain: Direct experience with IAM, PAM, IGA, or Secrets Management platforms

Pay

USD 126,000 - 204,500