Principal/Sr. Principal AI Engineer - IT Business Applications

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.

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.

We are hiring AI Engineers at the Principal and Senior Principal levels 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.

Strategic Architecture & Vision: Architect and govern the enterprise Proxy-First AI Ecosystem and unified API strategies, securing total model-vendor independence. Lead build-vs-buy decisions and establish standard architecture patterns across agentic, RAG, hybrid, and traditional systems. Lead-to-Cash Transformation: Spearhead multi-system GenAI transformations across marketing, sales compensation, and quote-to-cash workflows. Architect advanced reasoning pipelines, knowledge graphs, and autonomous multi-agent networks. Enterprise AI Observability & Optimization: Establish enterprise-wide "LLM as a Judge" evaluation standards and golden datasets. Design cost and performance optimization engines that dynamically route queries based on task complexity. Security Architecture & Defense: Set security standards for AI safety, PII protection, and adversarial defense (keyword filtering, behavioral analysis, adversarial training). Strategic Leadership & Influence: Lead high-ambiguity, cross-team technical initiatives. Communicate technical visions and business trade-offs directly to executive stakeholders while elevating engineering capabilities across the entire organization.

Required Experience: Principal: 12+ years of experience (or 8+ with a Master's degree). Sr. Principal: 15+ years of experience (or 12+ with a Master's, 8+ with a PhD). Technical Leadership: Track record of architecting and shipping complex, enterprise-grade distributed systems and full-stack AI platforms. Technical Mastery: Expert Python capabilities plus mastery of additional core languages (Go, Java, Node.js). Deep expertise in cloud-native microservices (AWS/Azure/GCP) and distributed architecture. AI & Agentic Systems: Proven