Principal Software Engineer

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.

We are looking for a highly experienced, curious, and driven Principal Software Engineer to join our Secure Workload Access (SWA) SaaS team. Secure Workload Access (SWA) enables organizations to securely authenticate, authorize, and manage workloads across cloud-native, hybrid, and AI-driven environments. Our platform focuses on secure service-to-service communication, workload identity, workload visibility, and centralized policy-driven access management at enterprise scale. This role presents an exciting opportunity to shape the future of secure workload communication and cloud-native security. You will work on complex distributed systems that span cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, networking, security, APIs, identity systems, and SaaS platform architecture.

Design, develop, and operate scalable cloud-native SaaS services for Secure Workload Access (SWA) Build secure and reliable systems for workload authentication, authorization, identity propagation, and centralized policy enforcement Drive architecture and technical direction across backend services, APIs, integrations, and distributed systems Collaborate closely with product managers, architects, customer-facing teams, and other engineering groups to shape product capabilities and priorities Design and implement integrations with Kubernetes, cloud providers, identity systems, PKI solutions, and related cloud-native technologies. Improve platform scalability, resiliency, observability, and operational efficiency across production environments Lead technical discussions, design reviews, and architectural decision-making across projects and teams Mentor engineers and help drive engineering best practices, technical growth, and high-quality software delivery Participate in troubleshooting complex production issues and improving operational readiness Help shape the long-term vision and evolution of the SWA platform and developer experience Qualifications Strong software engineering background including architecture, design, implementation, testing, and operational ownership Strong experience developing backend systems and distributed services in Golang Experience building scalable cloud-native or SaaS platforms Strong understanding of APIs, microservices, distributed systems, and service-to-service communication Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native ecosystems Experience in one or more of the following areas: security and identity systems workload identity authentication and authorization networking encryption and PKI JWT/SVID technologies SPIFFE/SPIRE cloud infrastructure and platforms Experience operating production systems at enterprise scale with high standards for reliability, performance, and security Experience improving observability