Staff Software Development Engineer in Test- SDET - hybrid

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

We’re looking for a Staff SDET to help us elevate performance testing as a core Quality practice across our cloud-native platform and self-hosted platform.

You’ll act as a Quality and Performance Engineer who builds tooling, frameworks and infrastructure that development teams trust and adopt. Performance is a key focus of this role – but it is one aspect of a broader mission: enabling teams to build scalable, reliable and production-ready systems.

Performance requirements are often implicit or under-defined – part of your role to help define what needs to be tested and how it should be measured.

This role sits within our Scale, Performance and Integrations Team and implies close collaboration with development teams, and other SDETs acting as Quality champions.

What You’ll Do

You will have the opportunity to:

• Implement and evolve performance and reliability tests

• Collaborate with other development teams to apply an existing performance testing direction and build upon it over time

• Build and maintain performance test components for load generation, ramp-up and steady-state testing, result collection and analysis

• Execute performance tests in CI/CD pipelines and support their integration into regular development workflows

• Use observability tools to analyze, visualize, and communicate performance results, including latency distributions, throughput, and error rates

• Store, track, and compare performance results over time to help identify regressions and trends

• Assist in emulating realistic customer environments, including networking, certificate-based flows, and multi-service interactions

• Partner with development teams to help them understand performance test results and improve system behavior under load

• Design and execute comprehensive tests utilizing application APIs.

#LI-KR1 #LI-Hybrid

Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience in test automation, SDET, performance engineering, or backend engineering roles, with a strong testing focus

• Strong coding skills in Go, or Python (Python preferred)

• Practical understanding of:

  • Performance testing types: baseline, load, stress, soak etc.

  • Load patterns (steady, ramp-up, spike, soak) and which scenarios they map to

  • Core performance metrics (p50/p90/p99 latency, throughput, error rates)

  • Setting performance goals

• Experience working with observability platforms to analyze and visualize performance data, such as: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog (or similar tools)

• Demonstrated experience with VMware vCenter and the pyVmomi SDK.

• Strong troubleshooting skills to diagnose test failures and fix flaky tests to ensure reliable CI/CD pipelines.

• Ability to analyze system behavior and determine performance bottlenecks.

• Familiarity with virtual machines, containers, container orchestration and serverless, in any specific vendor flavor

• Experience integrating tests into CI/CD pipelines

• Solid understanding of Linux-based systems; working knowledge of Windows environments

• Networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/S)

Nice to Have 

• Familiarity with performance testing tools such as k6, Locust, JMeter, Gatling, or custom-built load generators

• Experience working with containerized environments and distributed systems

• Experience with security-sensitive systems

• PKI and Certificate management

• Exposure to infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Ansible)

• Ability to write clean, consistent, and well documented code following best practices 

• Fast learner with strong problem solving and analytical skills 

• Ability to lead and multi-task, problem-solve, make decisions and operate in a fast-paced environment 

• Self-motivated, able to work independently and be reliable and responsive 

• Experience with typical IT infrastructure, such as load balancers, web servers, certificate authorities, identity management systems, etc. 

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.

$126,000.00 - $204,500.00/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