Sr Principal Engineer Software (AI Enablement & Strategy)

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

The Team
The Prisma AIRS team is on a mission to solve the hardest problems in AI security with unmatched quality, making us the undisputed leader in this critical market segment. We are an AI-first organization that builds and deploys the core security platform, encompassing AI Supply Chain Security, AI Red Teaming, and AI Runtime Security. As we transition the platform architecture to support the processing of trillions of tokens monthly for high-throughput enterprise customers, our engineers are focused on driving massive scalability and continuous innovation. We hire for "Multipliers" who embrace collaboration and are dedicated to defining the future of AI defense.

Job Summary

As we rapidly accelerate our adoption of AI across the organization, we are looking for a highly skilled Senior Principal Engineer to lead our internal AI enablement and developer productivity strategy.

In this high-visibility role, you will treat AI enablement as a core Developer Experience and platform challenge. You are a "0-to-1" builder who translates complex ML research and broad business requirements into secure, scalable, self-service software. By treating our internal engineers as your primary customers, you will build the strategy, infrastructure, and agentic workflows that democratize AI across the company. You will champion a culture of practical application, ensuring our AI tools perform reliably in a demanding, real-world enterprise environment.

This role can be located at our dynamic downtown Seattle office in the office 3 days a week.
 

Key Responsibilities

• Developer Experience & Self-Service Tooling: Democratize AI across the organization. Architect and implement the APIs, SDKs, and platform services that turn complex LLM capabilities and evaluation metrics into simple, self-service building blocks for our forward-deployed software engineers.

• Hands-on Prototyping: Rapidly prototype lightweight AI-enabled utilities and assess whether roadblocks are software-related or infrastructure-related before scaling them for production.

• Pragmatic Strategy & Technical Arbitration: Act as a trusted, neutral arbiter to drive consensus on AI architectures across cross-functional work streams. Drive a "leverage first, build second" roadmap—evaluating existing ecosystem capabilities while designing custom microservices only when necessary.

• Agentic DevOps & Operational Automation: Push the boundaries of operational automation by designing frontier agents that utilize generative AI, RAG pipelines, and knowledge graphs to transform incident response, DevOps, and daily engineering tasks.

• Removing Friction & Infrastructure Paved Roads: Lower the barrier to entry for teams looking to leverage AI. Package development environments, simplify initial setups, and eliminate the infrastructure friction that traditionally blocks rapid AI adoption.

• Governance, Security & Compliance: Solve the complex IT and access challenges required to deploy AI in a highly regulated cybersecurity environment. Partner with InfoSec and Legal to establish robust authentication flows, strict data access patterns, and ethical AI guardrails.

• Operational Excellence: Set the gold standard for AI-assisted development internally. Own technical decisions end-to-end, rigorously balancing cutting-edge AI capabilities with cloud infrastructure costs, latency requirements, and system reliability.

Qualifications

Preferred Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience designing large distributed systems, platform architecture, or enterprise-grade internal developer portals.

• Software First, AI Second: You are a seasoned distributed systems/software engineer who is fluent in AI. While you may not be building foundational models from scratch, you can interpret ML research code and assess whether a challenge is a software problem or an infrastructure limitation.

• Expertise in at least one modern programming language such as Python (type hints, Pydantic, etc.), Go, Java, C#, or C++.

• Deep, hands-on experience with foundational LLMs, vector databases, and AI orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen), with a strong focus on taking prototypes into stable production.

• 0-to-1 Builder: You are comfortable navigating ambiguous environments, defining technical strategy, and writing initial code before scaling it across a large engineering organization.

• Demonstrated ability to solve complex security, compliance, and access-control challenges in cloud environments (GCP, AWS, Azure).

• Exceptional communication and change-management skills; ability to influence executive leadership on ROI while serving as the approachable "go-to" AI expert for engineering teams.

• BS or MS in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent professional/military experience.

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