Principal DevOps Engineer (DexEx Platform)

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!

Job Summary

Your Career:

Welcome to the Developer Experience (DevEx) organization, where we shape how AI and large-scale engineering initiatives change the way our R&D builds software. We are looking for a Principal Engineer, DevEx AI & Strategic Initiatives to be a technical partner, a source of vision, and a force multiplier for the organization and the engineering teams we serve.

This role works across team boundaries. You will help shape how hundreds of engineers adopt AI across the full development lifecycle, and you will help lead initiatives that cut across teams and that no single team can drive alone. You will bring an outcome-driven mindset to these initiatives, helping teams stay focused on the problem and the users, as well as on the solution. You won't just evaluate tools. You will help turn AI from scattered experiments into measurable, secure, and repeatable engineering capability. If you are passionate about applied AI, enjoy bridging big-picture strategy with hands-on engineering, and want to lift an entire R&D organization, we'd love to build the future with you.

Your Impact:

• Help Define the AI Vision and Roadmap: Contribute to the multi-year technical strategy for AI in engineering, covering AI-assisted development, agentic workflows, testing, operations, security, and AI features in our products. Recommend where to build, buy, or adopt, and advise R&D leadership on emerging technologies, trade-offs, and risks.
• Drive Group-Wide Initiatives: Help identify, scope, and move high-impact cross-team initiatives from idea to adoption. Partner with stakeholders to frame the problem and users, shape priorities, and set clear ownership, milestones, and success metrics, keeping teams focused on outcomes rather than output.
• Build the AI Enablement Foundation: Help design the shared platform layer that makes AI easy and safe to use: approved models and gateways, MCP and tool integrations, reusable agents and skills, evaluation frameworks, and cost controls.
• Promote Secure AI Use and Measure Its Impact: Help shape guardrails for data handling, IP protection, agent permissions, and supply chain risk, working with Security, Legal, and Compliance. Help establish how we measure AI impact on velocity, quality, cost, and developer experience (including DORA-aligned metrics), so leadership sees real ROI.
• Champion Adoption, Culture, and Mentoring: Be an active advocate for AI-driven engineering across the group. Support training, guilds, and communities of practice, mentor engineers and tech leads, and help cultivate an InnerSource culture where teams contribute reusable AI assets.

Qualifications

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Platform Engineering, or DevOps, with at least 3 years in a Principal, Staff, or Architect role leading cross-organizational technical work.
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs and agentic systems in production: tool use, MCP, RAG, evaluation, guardrails, and cost and latency management.
• Strong programming skills in Python or Go, with a record of designing distributed systems, SDKs, or internal frameworks used by many teams.
• Proven ability to drive initiatives across multiple teams without direct authority, influencing both engineers and senior leadership.
• Cloud architecture experience at scale, preferably AWS, including secure, resilient, and cost-effective designs.
• Solid grounding in CI/CD, GitOps, and Infrastructure as Code, and in how AI changes these workflows.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex topics to executives and engineers alike.
• Strong user and outcome orientation, with experience helping prioritize across competing demands and defining success metrics for technical initiatives.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Education: BSc/MSc in Computer Science, or graduate of an elite tech unit (MAMRAM/8200).
• Community and Thought Leadership: open-source contributions, or speaking at industry conferences (KubeCon, DevOpsDays, AI engineering events).
• Internal Platform Experience: experience applying a user-centric approach to internal platforms and developer experience, such as developer advocacy or platform adoption.
• Security and Compliance: understanding of threat modeling for AI systems, IAM design, data governance, and software supply chain security.
• Experience supporting AI adoption programs at enterprise scale, including change management and measuring productivity impact.

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.