Principal Engineer Software - NGFW (NetSec) - Bangalore

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.

The Team Engineering - 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.

We are hiring a Principal Engineer Software to own the health, reliability, and release engineering of PA-VM, our virtualized next-generation firewall platform. In this hands-on systems-engineering role, you will debug complex issues across multiple active release trains and drive architecture reviews. You will own the cross-architecture build environment and CI/CD pipeline, mentoring engineers to raise the bar for a platform deployed in tens of thousands of global customer environments.

Own PA-VM platform health from UEFI boot path through Linux process supervision into firewall data-plane and HA/VPN control-plane daemons. Debug regressions across private and public cloud hypervisors and CPU architectures. Design and maintain Docker-based cross-architecture build environments for multi-format PA-VM images. Operate and evolve CI/CD pipelines with cherry-pick automation and hardware-in-the-loop regression gates. Design HA and VPN subsystem improvements for both on-prem and cloud-native environments. Instrument the fleet with telemetry, structured logging, automated crash-dump collection, and quality dashboards. Mentor engineers through complex debugging, drive architecture reviews, and run blameless post-mortems for P1 escapes. Partner cross-functionally with QA, Release Engineering, and Product Management to ship fixes safely.

10+ years of hands-on systems engineering on Linux-based appliances or virtualized platforms. Deep Linux systems expertise including boot/init flow, process supervisors, journald, cgroups, and core dumps. Hands-on virtualization experience across private and public cloud hypervisors like KVM, ESXi, AWS Nitro, and GCP KVM. Proficiency with both x86_64 and ARM64 platforms, including debugging ARM-specific regressions. Working knowledge of HA stateful failover and cloud-native HA patterns. Working knowledge of IPsec and SSL VPN protocols, including IKEv1/IKEv2 state machines and cryptographic agility. Proficiency in Docker-as-build-environment, including multi-arch manifests and hermetic builds. CI/CD proficiency across multiple release trains