Sr Principal Software Engineer/Architect (SRE/Platforms)

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.

Your Career We are looking for a visionary Senior Principal Engineer/Architect to serve as the technical authority for our global SRE and Platform Engineering initiatives across the US and India. This isn't just a "keep the lights on" role; you will be the primary architect and key technical driver of our AI-driven Autonomous SRE transformation at Palo Alto Networks. Acting as a strategic bridge between infrastructure products and operational excellence, you will partner directly with product architectures and engineering teams to translate complex requirements into automated, intelligent self-service platform capabilities, ensuring our global systems are not just reliable, but fully self-healing.

Identify and Architect End-to-End Solutions: Actively audit and identify current systemic bottlenecks across all infrastructure processes, release pipelines, and core services offered by the Platform/SRE organization. Design and deliver complex architectural frameworks that eliminate operational friction and address team-wide pain points. Drive AI-Powered Innovation: Spearhead the integration of advanced AI tooling, LLMs, and agentic workflows into the SRE ecosystem. Build intelligent platform features that proactively optimize infrastructure costs, reduce cognitive load during high-pressure situations, and automate the triage of complex system anomalies. Lead Scale and Reliability Engineering: Take full ownership of projects from inception to delivery—acting as the ultimate technical authority—to ensure our distributed systems, binary/config deployment frameworks, and observability pipelines scale seamlessly across cloud-native environments. Collaborate Cross-Functional & Think Beyond Implementation: Work closely with cross-functional leaders, engineering teams, and internal stakeholders to turn unstructured system metrics and process inefficiencies into highly automated, intuitive platform workflows. Challenge legacy assumptions to elevate the overall developer experience. Share Infrastructure & Tooling Accountability: Partner with platform engineers across the organization to design, maintain, and revolutionize automated validation frameworks, immutable artifact deployment structures, and resilient self-healing infrastructure. Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Foster a culture of accelerated learning, continuous growth, and high engineering standards. Mentor senior technical colleagues across the company in building reliable, highly performant, and intelligent platform systems through direct mentorship and design review leadership.

Your Experience Proven Technical Leadership: Exceptional ability to own large-scale platform projects from inception to production delivery, driving