Sr IT Software Engineer - IT Go-To-Market & Customer Experience Santa Clara, California,

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.

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.

Information Technology (IT) - The Information Technology team at Palo Alto Networks provides the infrastructure, applications, and services that enable our global workforce to innovate and succeed. We are business partners and enablers, focused on creating seamless and secure technology experiences. From enterprise applications and cloud services to network infrastructure and user support, our team is dedicated to empowering every employee and driving the company's mission forward through technology.

We are seeking a Sr. Staff Software Engineer for our IT Customer Experience Team to define the technical vision for our go‑to‑market platform. You will deliver custom-built technology, including microservices and AI-powered systems, engaging with multiple teams to shape architecture and elevate engineering practices. In this role, you will drive technical strategy, mentor engineers, and deliver high‑quality, scalable technology products in a fast‑paced environment, adapting to new business needs and emerging technologies.

• Architect and evolve scalable, highly reliable business systems across multiple services and teams.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards and best practices within an agile development environment.
• Provide technical leadership for complex initiatives, including determining project requirements and developing work schedules.
• Balance technical debt, product stability, and new features against go‑to‑market timelines.
• Represent the engineering team in cross‑functional and leadership discussions with strong verbal and written communication.
• Mentor and challenge engineers at all levels to foster their professional growth and development.
• Drive the technical strategy for LLM‑powered systems, focusing on context caching, token optimization, and latency reduction.
• Establish evaluation and observability frameworks to measure AI quality and system reliability.

Required Qualifications:

• 8 years of software development or equivalent experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 6 years with a Master’s degree; or a PhD with 3 years experience.
• Proven experience with microservices architecture (API, Web, DB, Distributed Systems) and designing systems at scale.
• Hands‑on expertise in Java, including Spring Framework (Spring Boot, IOC, MVC, JPA) and Hibernate.
• Experience building and consuming web services, particularly RESTful APIs, with a strong understanding of API design patterns.
• Demonstrated experience building production applications using LLM APIs such as Google Vertex AI/Gemini, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
• Familiarity with vector embeddings, semantic search, and similarity‑based retrieval patterns.
• Proficiency with at least one relational (MySQL, Postgre
  
  SQL) or No
  
  SQL (Mongo
  
  DB, Firestore) database.
• Experience developing container‑based applications on a major cloud platform (GCP, AWS, Azure) using Kubernetes and Helm.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with…