Principal Performance Engineer (Cortex Cloud)

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

• Design and implement end-to-end performance testing strategies for distributed cloud-native systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, responsiveness and cost efficiency.

• Build and maintain robust, reusable performance test frameworks and pipelines using tools like JMeter, Locust, or custom Python-based solutions.

• Develop and execute load, stress, soak, and failover tests to simulate real-world usage patterns, edge cases, and peak load scenarios.

• Identify system bottlenecks, resource contention, and inefficiencies across services, infrastructure, and code; work cross-functionally to drive resolution.

• Collaborate with Product and Customer Success teams to understand key customer workflows and usage patterns, translating them into performance SLAs and test scenarios.

• Integrate performance tests into CI/CD pipelines and staging environments to enable continuous performance validation and pre-release gatekeeping.

• Define and track key performance metrics (e.g., latency, throughput, system resource usage) and build dashboards using Prometheus, Grafana, or other observability platforms.

• Perform deep-dive analysis of performance test results, system telemetry, and application profiling data (e.g., Flamegraphs, heap dumps).

• Advocate for performance-first design principles across engineering teams; influence architectural decisions to improve system efficiency and testability.

• Contribute to chaos engineering and fault injection efforts to validate system resilience under adverse conditions.

• Lead incident retrospectives related to performance degradation and provide guidance for proactive tuning and improvements.

• Thrive in a fast-paced environment, owning performance initiatives from inception through implementation and continuous iteration.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering or performance engineering, with a strong focus on testing and optimizing distributed cloud-native systems.

• Proven track record in building and executing performance testing strategies in complex, large-scale environments.

• Deep knowledge in programming and scripting skills in Python (preferred), performance tools like JMeter, Locust and others. 

• Skillful in leveraging AI to improve test planning, test setup and automation, and reporting and analysis to accelerate project delivery, ensure quality and continually increase team productivity.

• Expertise in performance profiling, diagnostics, and tuning across microservice architectures.

• Deep understanding of cloud platforms (GCP, AWS and/or Azure), DB technologies (BigQuery, MySQL/Postgre, elastic search, redis, etc..), Kubernetes, and cloud-native service architectures.

• Strong knowledge of database performance, caching strategies, and distributed systems principles.

• Hands-on experience with observability and monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry etc.

• Excellent analytical, debugging, and troubleshooting skills at the system and application levels.

• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to influence architecture and drive performance culture across engineering.

• Familiarity with capacity planning, system tuning, and infrastructure sizing for cloud-native applications.

• Prior experience leading performance initiatives in multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud environments.

• Strong knowledge of CI/CD systems and infrastructure automation, including Gitlab, Jenkins or similar.

• Experience with Java JVM tuning, Golang profiling.

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.

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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.

$147,000.00 - $237,500.00/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