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About the job

Principal DevOps Engineer (US Citizen) Santa Clara, California, United States of America Product Engineering Ref ID: JR-019363 Apply Current Employees, apply here

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

The Cortex team builds and delivers the industry’s most advanced SecOps platform, consisting of XDR, XSIAM, XSOAR, and XPANSE. As a Principal DevOps Engineer for the Cortex platform, you will serve as a technical pillar and visionary, architecting, scaling, and optimizing a massive-scale, multi-region GCP environment.

In this high-impact role, you will leverage a deep, comprehensive DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering skillset to define the future of our cloud infrastructure. You will not just operate systems; you will set engineering standards, pioneer infrastructure-as-code paradigms, and drive organizational alignment across product engineering and specialized CI/CD groups. Your mission is to champion absolute system resilience, eliminate engineering friction at scale, and guarantee that our next-generation SecOps platform remains secure, cost-optimized, and highly available.

Key Responsibilities

Architectural Leadership & IaC Strategy: Design and govern the global, multi-region cloud infrastructure strategy using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles (Terraform). Establish blueprints and modular architectures that scale seamlessly across the enterprise.

Strategic CI/CD & Platform Engineering: Partner with engineering leadership and specialized pipeline teams to architect robust, secure, and self-healing continuous delivery workflows, radically reducing time-to-market for Cortex features.

Cloud Economics & Optimization: Drive the long-term optimization strategy for our global GCP footprint. Architect for maximum performance, multi-zone reliability, and sophisticated cost-efficiency/FinOps models.

Consultative Engineering & Influence: Serve as a trusted advisor to Product Engineering teams. Influence the core application architecture early in the lifecycle to ensure services are natively containerized, horizontally scalable, and highly observable.

Systemic Reliability & Incident Governance: Act as a critical escalation point for complex, systemic outages. Lead post-mortems, identify systemic vulnerabilities, and design architectural mitigations to prevent recurring incidents across the entire platform.

Advanced Tooling & R&D: Spearhead the creation of internal platforms, automated remediation frameworks, and intelligent auto-scaling solutions to eliminate manual operational toil.

Technology Evangelism: Continually evaluate emerging technologies, paradigms, and open-source tools. Define the technical roadmap for the DevOps organization and mentor senior engineers across the team.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

10+ years of experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, or Cloud Architecture, with a proven track record of owning large-scale, business-critical production environments.

Cloud Infrastructure: Deep, authoritative expertise in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Amazon Web Services (AWS), including complex networking, IAM governance, and multi-region architectures.

Container Orchestration: Expert-level mastery of Kubernetes (GKE/EKS) and the broader cloud-native ecosystem (Service Meshes, Ingress controllers, advanced scheduling).

Automation & Software Engineering: High proficiency in Python or Go, advanced Linux internals, and robust shell scripting. Expert-level experience designing maintainable, dry, and scalable Terraform modules.

Enterprise CI/CD: Deep architectural understanding of enterprise-scale software delivery pipelines (e.g., GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins) and GitOps methodologies (e.g., ArgoCD).

Observability & Telemetry: Proven experience designing comprehensive, platform-wide observability strategies using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, and PagerDuty.

Preferred Qualifications

Technical Leadership: Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional initiatives, influence engineering directors, and align technical roadmaps across distributed global teams.

Complex Problem Solving: Exceptional capacity for troubleshooting deeply complex, distributed systems, networking bottlenecks, and cloud infrastructure anomalies.

Autonomy & Decision Making: A proven track record of operating with absolute autonomy, making high-stakes architectural decisions, and owning the long-term outcomes.

#LI-NP1

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 (opens in new window) .

$151,000.00 - $244,200.00/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 accommodations@paloaltonetworks.com (opens in new window) .

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, gen