Sr. Principal Data 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.

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

Your Career

As a Data Plane Engineer, you will be instrumental in building the core infrastructure that powers our next-generation security platform. You will design and develop our detection and prevention engines, focusing on ultra-low latency, high-throughput packet processing, and sidecar architectures. Operating at the heart of our network security stack, your work will ensure that our customers can enforce complex security policies at line speed without compromising on performance or reliability.

Your Impact

• Design, build, and optimize our core inline detection/prevention engine, ensuring maximum throughput and absolute minimal latency for network traffic.
• Develop robust sidecar architectures to securely intercept, inspect, and route traffic in distributed and cloud-native environments.
• Engineer and maintain highly efficient trace store mechanisms for deep network telemetry, observability, and rapid threat forensics.
• Architect high-performance algorithms to achieve sub-ms policy evaluation, enabling real-time security enforcement at scale.
• Implement advanced memory management techniques, focusing on local cache optimization and high-speed data streaming pipelines.
• Collaborate closely with threat research and machine learning teams to seamlessly integrate advanced detection models directly into the data plane.

Your Experience

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).
• 5+ years of software engineering experience focusing on systems programming, high-performance computing, or networking infrastructure.
• Exceptional programming skills with a deep understanding of memory management, concurrency, and multi-threading.
• Knowledge of Rust is highly desired and considered a strong additional advantage.
• Strong background in optimizing distributed systems for low-latency (sub-millisecond) performance.
• Familiarity with caching strategies, data streaming architectures, and network protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP/2, gRPC).