AI-First Core IT Software Engineering: Software, ML & Data (Staff – Principal)

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 We are hiring AI Engineers at multiple levels (Lead/Staff through Senior Principal) to join our IT Business Applications team. This group builds and operates the technology platforms that power Marketing, Sales, and the full Lead-to-Cash lifecycle. This is a solutions engineering role, not a data science or ML research role. You will act as a hands-on technical leader who uses AI as building blocks—LLMs, agents, RAG, embeddings—to deliver production solutions that solve real business problems. You will partner directly with business and product stakeholders, translate requirements into scalable architecture, and own delivery end-to-end from design through production operations. You will move beyond traditional software engineering to design intelligent, agentic workflows that revolutionize our Go-To-Market (GTM) and customer experience processes—ensuring our platforms are the most secure and efficient in the industry, directly improving operational revenue generation. Your Impact AI Architecture & Solution Design Business-to-Architecture Translation: Partner with business and product teams to deeply understand requirements. Translate business intent into scalable, modern technical architectures that meet non-functional requirements (performance, reliability, scalability, security, observability). AI Gateway Architecture: Architect a Proxy-First AI Ecosystem—an intermediary layer that ensures vendor independence, allowing seamless switching between LLMs (e.g., GPT-4, Llama, Anthropic) without refactoring core application code. Unified API Design: Build a single, unified API endpoint that abstracts the complexities of individual LLM providers, providing centralized control for access and security. Technology Selection: Evaluate and choose the right architecture patterns for each use case—selecting from agentic, RAG, workflow-based, hybrid, or traditional engineering approaches based on problem characteristics. Build vs. Buy Decisions: Make principled technology choices. Design for maintainability, extensibility, and operational excellence. GenAI & Multi-Agent Systems Agentic AI Development: Design and build sophisticated Multi-Agent Systems and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) workflows capable of planning, multi-step execution, self-correction, and collaboration with humans or other agents. Business Workflow Automation: Apply GenAI to complex GTM business logic—automating workflows such as customer support, sales compensation, entitlement platforms, and partner channel operations. Lead-to-Cash Transformation: Own end-to-end delivery of MarTech and FinTech initiatives, from technical design to operational readiness, leveraging AI to transform quote-to-cash processes. Advanced Reasoning Pipelines: Develop retrieval systems, knowledge graph integrations, and reasoning pipelines that support autonomous task execution. AI Observability & Quality LLM Observability: Implement comprehensive observability pipelines for GenAI—tracking trace-level data, prompt inputs/outputs, model latency, and cost. Cost & Performance Optimization: Design architecture that routes queries to the optimal model based on complexity, balancing performance and expense. Evaluation Frameworks: Pioneer "LLM as a Judge" testing methodologies—using capable models to evaluate the correctness, tone, and helpfulness of system outputs. Establish golden datasets for ground truth testing. Feedback Loops: Integrate observability data into the development cycle to identify bottlenecks, high-latency chains, and model drift in real-time. Security & Governance AI Safety Implementation: Build robust guardrails to filter inputs and outputs—preventing PII exposure, offensive content, and prompt injection attacks. This is a cybersecurity company; security-first thinking is non-negotiable. Adversarial Defense: Develop detection mechanisms including keyword filtering, behavioral analysis, and adversarial training to protect model instructions from manipulation. Graceful Degradation: Design systems that are resilient to AI component failures with proper fallbacks. Leadership & Communication End-to-End Ownership: Drive solution development from prototype to production, ensuring scalability, reliability, and performance. Stakeholder Communication: Communicate complex technical decisions and trade-offs clearly to both engineering peers AND business stakeholders/executives. Mentorship: Mentor and guide engineers, elevating engineering practices across the organization. Cross-Team Influence: Lead high-ambiguity, cross-team technical initiatives and drive alignment. Qualifications Qualifications Required Staff - 5+ years Lead / Sr. Staff - 8+ years Principal - 12+ years (or 8+ with Master's) Senior Principal - 15+ years (or 12+ with Master's, 8+ with PhD) Experience All Levels: Expert-level proficiency in Python; strong proficiency in at least one additional core language (Go, Java, Node.js, or equivalent). Proven, hands-on experience building applications using Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, Llama 3, and Anthropic Claude (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus, Fable). Deep experience designing and building Multi-Agent systems, Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication, and orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph). Proven track record building multi-tiered, enterprise-grade full-stack systems. Strong knowledge of distributed systems, microservice architecture, and cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP). Demonstrated ability to partner with business/product stakeholders and translate business requirements into system designs. Modern software engineering practices: API design, event-driven architecture, CI/CD, observability. Experience delivering in Agile/Scrum environments with aggressive timelines. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field (or equivalent experience). Preferred Proficiency with AI tracing and evaluation tools (LangSmith, Arize, HoneyHive, or custom OpenTelemetry implementations). Knowledge of Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) transformation and revenue operations. Experience with GTM, Sales, Partner/Channel Sales, or services business processes. Experience establishing golden datasets and performing comparative analysis across models. Familiarity with building supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised models. Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence at all levels. What "Good" Looks Like A strong candidate for this role will: Hear a business problem and immediately start designing the solution architecture—API contracts, data flow, AI component selection, UX considerations, SLAs. Choose between RAG, fine-tuning, agentic approaches, or traditional engineering based on problem characteristics —not based on what they've built before. Design the full stack: how the user interacts with it, how AI components integrate, how the system handles failures, how it scales, how it's monitored. Treat LLMs, agents, and AI capabilities as components in a larger engineering solution—understanding their constraints and trade-offs (latency, cost, reliability, hallucination risk) and designing around them. Communicate architecture clearly to both engineering peers and business stakeholders. Own the solution end-to-end, not just one layer. Compensation The compensation offered will depend on qualifications, experience, and work location. The offered compensation may include base salary, restricted stock units, and a bonus. Work Model We believe collaboration thrives in person. Most of our teams work from the office full time (Santa Clara, CA HQ), with flexibility when it's needed. Immigration Sponsorship: Yes, this role is eligible. Our Commitment We're trailblazers that dream big, take risks, and challenge cybersecurity's status quo. We can't accomplish our mission without diverse teams innovating, together. 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. 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] . Compensation Disclosure The compensation offered for this position will depend on qualifications, experience, and work location. For candidates who receive an offer at the posted level, the starting base salary (for non-sales roles) or base salary + commission target (for sales/com-missioned roles) is expected to be the annual range listed below. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found here . $145,000.00 - $235,500.00/yr 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?: Yes