Principal Escalation Engineer (Next Generation Firewall / Cloud Security)

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

Principal Escalation Engineer (Customer Engineering)

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks® everything starts and ends with our mission:

Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.

We have the vision of a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. These aren’t easy goals to accomplish – but we’re not here for easy. We’re here for better. We are a company built on the foundation of challenging and disrupting the way things are done, and we’re looking for innovators who are as committed to shaping the future of cybersecurity as we are.

Disruption is at the core of our technology and on our way of work to meet the needs of our employees now and in the future through FLEXWORK, our approach to how we work. We’re changing the nature of work from benefits to learning, location to leadership, we’ve rethought and recreated every aspect of the employee experience at Palo Alto Networks. And because it FLEXes around each individual employee based on their individual choices, employees are empowered to push boundaries and help us all evolve, together.

Your Career

This is a highly visible, senior level position in the customer engineering team that will benefit from out of box thinking and technical insight. The ideal Principal Escalation Engineer has a mix and background of customer management and broad and deep technical skills related to telecommunication equipment and Internet traffic. This Customer Engineering role is positioned to intercept and assist or drive technical escalations that come to the engineering for helping triage and drive towards resolution . Escalations of this type are extremely critical and are driven by the account teams in the field. In this role you will engage executive levels at customers, delivering get well plans, explaining the root cause or progress and addressing technical questions during customer interactions. Focal point to provide status to internal stakeholders and drive product improvements through serviceability.

Key responsibilities and requirements typically include:

• Incident Management: Leading "war rooms" and managing Sev1/Sev2 incidents to resolve complex technical blockers across cloud infrastructures, distributed systems, and networks.

• Root Cause Analysis (RCA): Triaging escalated issues and performing deep-dive diagnostics, log tracing, and code-level investigations to eliminate recurring problems

• Cross-functional Collaboration: Acting as the primary liaison between customers and internal product/engineering teams to validate permanent bug fixes and improve overall product quality.

• Technical Requirements: requires 7+ years of industry experience and deep domain knowledge, such as Layer 1-7 OSI networking, packet capture analysis, dynamic routing (BGP/OSPF), Cybersecurity solutions including firewall/vpn technologies and advanced troubleshooting via tools like Wireshark

• Mentorship: Advising and mentoring junior engineers while promoting best practices in problem resolution and incident management.

Your Impact

• Understand escalation process, identify areas of gaps and work on improvements in existing processes

• You will work with internal support teams, service delivery teams and account teams to provide solutions to critical customer situations

• Support & drive customer get well plans

• Support, debug, and break fix any issues collaborating with internal engineering teams

• Coordinate day-to-day problem, issue resolution and ensure timely resolution of issues

• Co-dev any innovative tools helping in problem troubleshooting and resolution

Qualifications

Your Experience

• BE /B.tech or equivalent technical graduation is mandatory

• Overall 7+ years experience in the IT Industry with relevant experience in support service, technical support or similar troubleshooting related roles will be preferred.

• Deep knowledge of network operations/protocols, such as TCP/UDP, IPv4/IPv6, VLSM/CIDR, NAT; and authentication protocols like LDAP, TACACS+, Radius.

• L1-L7 (OSI model) troubleshooting

• Configuring and troubleshooting dynamic routing protocols (primarily BGP and OSPF)

• Hardware, Software, and Cloud-based troubleshooting for network security equipment

• Experience with troubleshooting Remote Access VPN solutions including IPSEC, PKI & SSL technologies.

• Experience with cloud networking and instances on AWS, Azure, or GCP

• PCAP analysis (via Wireshark and other tools), experience with Packet crafting/replay and traffic generation tools

• Linux and Python knowledge.

• Development and use of LLM based debug tools.

• Knowledge of C, C++ and python programming languages(Good to have)

• Any relevant certifications is an advantage ( cloud AWS, GCP or Azure, JNCIE, CCIE etc)

The Team

NGFW Customer Engineering team is the voice of the customers into engineering by optimizing Engineering-Customer interactions by resolving critical customer situations and improving the factors leading to escalations.

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? No. Please note that we will not sponsor applicants for work visas for this position.