Staff Engineer Software

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. Job Summary * This role requires the employee to be in the Needham office 3x per week.* We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to drive technical execution and contribute to the ongoing evolution of our platform. In this role, you will take technical ownership of core platform components, translate ambiguous feature requirements into clean, scalable software, and leverage AI-first development workflows to accelerate delivery and elevate code quality. You will serve as a key technical anchor—designing modular systems, optimizing workflows, and ensuring production reliability. What You’ll Do Drive End-to-End Feature Delivery: Take ownership of complex feature sets and components. Break down ambiguous requirements into execution-ready tasks, estimate work accurately, and reliably deliver high-quality solutions end-to-end. Implement AI-First Engineering Practices: Apply high AI tool fluency and prompt engineering to streamline daily development. Rigorously review and validate AI-generated code to prevent security gaps, logic defects, and hallucinations before committing. Design for Extensibility & Modularity: Propose clean feature designs and API interfaces using standard architectural patterns. Write modular, testable code that gracefully balances performance, reliability, and maintainability. Practice Defensive & Secure Engineering: Anticipate edge cases (limits, nulls, complex authorization paths) early in the development cycle. Write integration tests and defensive logic to lower defect escape rates. Translate Requirements into Intuitive Workflows: Partner closely with Product and Design to understand user scenarios, clarify acceptance criteria early, and build seamless frontend and backend implementations that reduce friction. Maintain Production Service Excellence: Act as a champion for component health. Actively participate in root cause analysis (RCA) on production incidents, implement durable fixes, and reduce MTTR. Foster Team Capability & Knowledge Sharing: Share technical learnings, document tribal knowledge, and author "RAG-ready" technical notes. Write clear RFCs and tickets to keep partners informed and help uplevel peer engineers. #LI-KR Qualifications Relevant Experience: 2+ years of professional software engineering experience building, shipping, and maintaining production-grade applications. Full-Stack Proficiency: Hands-on experience building enterprise-grade applications using the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, Angular, Node.js). Cloud Infrastructure Experience: Practical experience building, deploying, and operating scalable solutions within the AWS ecosystem. AI Tooling & Code Verification: Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools and prompt engineering, paired with peer-review rigor