Staff Engineer Software

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

*This role requires the employee to be in the Needham office 3x per week.*

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to drive technical execution and contribute to the ongoing evolution of our platform. In this role, you will take technical ownership of core platform components, translate ambiguous feature requirements into clean, scalable software, and leverage AI-first development workflows to accelerate delivery and elevate code quality. You will serve as a key technical anchor—designing modular systems, optimizing workflows, and ensuring production reliability.

What You’ll Do

• Drive End-to-End Feature Delivery: Take ownership of complex feature sets and components. Break down ambiguous requirements into execution-ready tasks, estimate work accurately, and reliably deliver high-quality solutions end-to-end.
• Implement AI-First Engineering Practices: Apply high AI tool fluency and prompt engineering to streamline daily development. Rigorously review and validate AI-generated code to prevent security gaps, logic defects, and hallucinations before committing.
• Design for Extensibility & Modularity: Propose clean feature designs and API interfaces using standard architectural patterns. Write modular, testable code that gracefully balances performance, reliability, and maintainability.
• Practice Defensive & Secure Engineering: Anticipate edge cases (limits, nulls, complex authorization paths) early in the development cycle. Write integration tests and defensive logic to lower defect escape rates.
• Translate Requirements into Intuitive Workflows: Partner closely with Product and Design to understand user scenarios, clarify acceptance criteria early, and build seamless frontend and backend implementations that reduce friction.
• Maintain Production Service Excellence: Act as a champion for component health. Actively participate in root cause analysis (RCA) on production incidents, implement durable fixes, and reduce MTTR.
• Foster Team Capability & Knowledge Sharing: Share technical learnings, document tribal knowledge, and author "RAG-ready" technical notes. Write clear RFCs and tickets to keep partners informed and help uplevel peer engineers.

#LI-KR

Qualifications

• Relevant Experience: 2+ years of professional software engineering experience building, shipping, and maintaining production-grade applications.
• Full-Stack Proficiency: Hands-on experience building enterprise-grade applications using the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, Angular, Node.js).
• Cloud Infrastructure Experience: Practical experience building, deploying, and operating scalable solutions within the AWS ecosystem.
• AI Tooling & Code Verification: Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools and prompt engineering, paired with peer-review rigor to verify AI outputs for correctness, safety, and security.
• Feature Design & System Refactoring: Solid foundation in designing clean APIs, refactoring component code bases, and applying standard design patterns for long-term maintainability.
• Operational Ownership & Testing: Strong debugging skills with experience in writing robust tests (unit/integration), participating in RCA processes, and resolving production issues.
• Navigating Ambiguity & Collaboration: Demonstrated ability to clarify requirements, adapt technical tactics as priorities shift, raise blockers early, and collaborate effectively with PM, Design, and engineering peers.

Nice to Have

• Identity & Access Security Domain: Experience with IAM, PAM, IGA, or Secrets Management platforms.
• Modern Frontend & Quality Tooling: Fluency in TypeScript along with automated testing frameworks such as Jest, Playwright, or JMeter for load/stress testing.
• DevOps & Observability Ecosystems: Practical experience with CI/CD pipelines, feature flagging tools, and modern monitoring/logging frameworks.
• Context Engineering & Retrieval: Experience structuring codebase documentation and architecture for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and reusable prompt templating.

Impact
As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be a vital technical anchor for your team. By combining hands-on technical execution, modular design, and AI-first workflows, you will turn product goals into secure, scalable, and maintainable capabilities. Your success will be measured by the reliability of the software you deliver, the operational health of your services, and your ability to elevate the velocity and engineering standards of your immediate team.

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.

$104,000.00 - $169,500.00/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.

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.

Is role eligible for Immigration Sponsorship?: Yes