Principal DevOps Engineer (Cortex)

Company Description

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks® everything starts and ends with our mission:

Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.
Our vision is a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. We are a company built on the foundation of challenging and disrupting the way things are done, and we’re looking for innovators who are as committed to shaping the future of cybersecurity as we are.

Who We Are

We take our mission of protecting the digital way of life seriously. We are relentless in protecting our customers and we believe that the unique ideas of every member of our team contributes to our collective success. Our values were crowdsourced by employees and are brought to life through each of us everyday - from disruptive innovation and collaboration, to execution. From showing up for each other with integrity to creating an environment where we all feel included.

As a member of our team, you will be shaping the future of cybersecurity. We work fast, value ongoing learning, and we respect each employee as a unique individual. Knowing we all have different needs, our development and personal wellbeing programs are designed to give you choice in how you are supported. This includes our FLEXBenefits wellbeing spending account with over 1,000 eligible items selected by employees, our mental and financial health resources, and our personalized learning opportunities - just to name a few!

At Palo Alto Networks, we believe in the power of collaboration and value in-person interactions. This is why our employees generally work full time from our office with flexibility offered where needed. This setup fosters casual conversations, problem-solving, and trusted relationships. Our goal is to create an environment where we all win with precision.

Job Description

Your Career

We’re looking for a Principal Engineer to join the Cortex SRE Production team at our India Development Center (IDC). This is a high-impact role where you’ll collaborate with global SRE and DevOps teams to enhance visibility, reliability, and automation across our production infrastructure via tooling and platform development. 

Your Impact

As a Principal Engineer in the Global SRE Automation group, you will shape the future of infrastructure reliability, scale, and developer productivity. You will lead the design and development of cloud-native automation tools, streamline operational workflows, and embed resilience into every layer of the platform.

You will:

• Architect and build automation systems that support self-healing, observability, and service-level assurance.
• Contribute to the developer experience and internal tooling ecosystem, driving reliability through code.
• Influence the SRE strategy by introducing innovations in cloud-native backend services, Kubernetes automation, and platform engineering.
• Partner with global teams to deliver reliable infrastructure, integrating AI models, event-driven systems, and data pipelines to unlock operational insights.
• Set standards for code quality, system design, and operational excellence across the organization.

Qualifications

Your Experience 

• 10+ years of experience in Cloud Engineering, DevOps, or Infrastructure Software Development, with a strong focus on automation, reliability, and platform scalability.
• Deep expertise in AWS and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with strong understanding of networking, compute, serverless, and cost-optimization services.
• Proficient in Python or Go, with a solid grasp of modern backend development frameworks (e.g., Flask, FastAPI, Gin) and cloud-native application design.
• Hands-on experience building RESTful APIs, microservices, and cloud-native platforms supporting high availability and self-service.
• Designed and integrated Generative AI and LLM-based pipelines, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), into internal tooling and operational systems to enhance developer productivity and incident response.
• Applied predictive analytics, anomaly detection, and MLOps for use cases such as cost forecasting, capacity planning, and proactive incident management.
• Built and optimized Cloud FinOps tooling to monitor usage patterns, reduce waste, and provide actionable insights into cloud spend.
• Developed AI-driven automation agents (bots) for cloud operations, alert triage, knowledge retrieval, and ticket deflection.
• Strong experience with:
  - Infrastructure-as-Code: Terraform, CDK
  - Kubernetes: Cluster lifecycle management, Helm/Kustomize, GitOps (ArgoCD)
  - CI/CD pipelines, observability frameworks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK), and SRE tooling for incident automation.
• Proficient in SQL and NoSQL databases, such as PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch.
• Exposure to Kafka and event-driven architectures for real-time data streaming and integration.
• Excellent problem-solving, debugging, and systems design skills.
• Demonstrated leadership in cross-functional engineering teams, including mentoring, architectural guidance, and influencing long-term platform direction

Additional Information

The Team

To stay ahead of the curve, it’s critical to know where the curve is, and how to anticipate the changes we’re facing. For the fastest-growing cybersecurity company, the curve is the evolution of cyberattacks and access technology and the products and services that dedicatedly address them. Our engineering team is at the core of our products – connected directly to the mission of preventing cyberattacks and enabling secure access to all on-prem and cloud applications. They are constantly innovating – challenging the way we, and the industry, think about Access and security. These engineers aren’t shy about building products to solve problems no one has pursued before. They define the industry, instead of waiting for directions. We need individuals who feel comfortable in ambiguity, excited by the prospect of challenge, and empowered by the unknown risks facing our everyday lives that are only enabled by a secure digital environment.

Our engineering team is provided with an unrivaled chance to create the products and practices that will support our company growth over the next decade, defining the cybersecurity industry as we know it. If you see the potential of how incredible people and products can transform a business, this is the team for you.   If the prospect of affecting tens of millions of people, enabling them to work remotely securely and easily in ways never done before, thrill you - you belong with us.

Our Commitment

We’re problem solvers that 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.

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, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or other legally protected characteristics.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.