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Sr Staff Software Software

Palo Alto Networks

Santa Clara, CAJob$135–218K/yrSeen todaySeen in employer's feed today

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At a glance

Compensation
$135–218K/yr
Location
Santa Clara, CA
Work Authorization
Visa required • Visa sponsorship

Olive lists jobs from US employers, including remote roles you can work from the United States.

Job overview

Palo Alto Networks is hiring a senior staff software engineer to build enterprise-grade security-as-a-service offerings and scalable backend systems. The role spans the product lifecycle and involves collaboration with Product Management, SRE, ML, and Quality Engineering. The engineer will address complex system challenges, optimize performance, and work with cloud-native technologies, model-serving infrastructure, and modern development practices.

Skills & qualifications

RequiredNice to have

Skills

PythonGolangDistributed SystemsMicroservices ArchitectureAPI DevelopmentCloud-Native SolutionsRelational DatabasesNoSQL DatabasesKubernetesGitLabArgoCDGrafanaPrometheusQuality AssuranceAgentic WorkflowsMulti-Agent Orchestration

Qualifications

Bachelor's in Computer Science or Related Field or Master's5+ Years Industry Experience With Bachelor's or 4+ Years With Master's

Full job description

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

Key Responsibilities

  • Participate in all aspects of the product lifecycle.

  • Cross-functional collaboration with Product Management, SRE, ML, and Quality Engineering teams to deliver new, enterprise-grade security as a service offerings in a timely fashion.

  • Tackle complex, ambiguous technical challenges across system boundaries, translating high-level product and security vision into resilient, production-ready backend architectures.

  • Support identification of technical bottlenecks and scaling opportunities, driving continuous performance and efficiency optimizations to maximize throughput, lower latency, and streamline resource utilization at scale.

  • Learn and implement modern engineering best practices, including agentic coding workflows and spec-driven development within the team.

  • Working with the software engineering, product management, SRE teams during softwareproduct development and deployment.

  • Execution of large-scale enterprise systems with model serving infrastructure, ensuring seamless, scalable integration across backend services and partner engineering services.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field with 5+ years of relevant industry experience, or a Master's degree with 4+ years of experience

  • Developing and automating the upcoming new software features in cloud environment;

  • Domain expertise in designing, building, and operating highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems, with exceptional programming skills in Python or Golang.

  • Execution of designing enterprise-wide Microservices architectures, building, and deploying high-throughput, globally scaled APIs to meet strict SLOs, maximize throughput, and reduce compute costs in production.

  • Experience with cloud-native solutions (GCP preferred), relational/NoSQL databases, container management (Kubernetes), enterprise CI/CD (GitLab, ArgoCD), and full-stack observability (Grafana, Prometheus).

  • Working with the software engineering, product management, SRE teams during software product development and deployment.

  • Experience developing, automating, and executing QA processes including test plans, test cases,software tools, and cloud infrastructure to improve product quality and efficiency of deployment and maintenance of the cloud system is a plus.

  • Exposure to building, and deploying complex Agentic workflows, tool-use pipelines, or multi-agent orchestrations.

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 (https://benefits.paloaltonetworks.com/) .

$134,600.00 - $217,800.00/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 [email protected] .

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

How this job compares

Set against the 41,311 open Software Engineer jobs on Olive Jobs, counted November 4, 2026.

Pay
  • This posting$135–218K/yr
  • California median$165–245K/yr7,675 salary ranges
  • US median$134–215K/yr32,980 salary ranges

This range's midpoint, $176K, is 14% below the California median midpoint ($205K) — in the middle half of Software Engineer salary ranges in California.

Openings
Olive Jobs lists 9,550 open Software Engineer jobs in California and 41,311 across the US. 7% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
Hiring the most in California
Experience
This posting asks for at least 4 years of experience; Software Engineer postings that state a minimum ask for 5 years at the median (33,552 postings).
Education
14,305 of the 41,311 open Software Engineer jobs (35%) ask for a bachelor's degree or higher.

Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on November 4, 2026. Pay medians are the middle values of the low ends and of the high ends of postings that list both ends of a range in the same cadence (a yearly salary or an hourly rate); a range's midpoint is halfway between its ends. Pay and experience figures resting on fewer than 20 postings are left out.

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