Sr Staff Software Engineer

Palo Alto Networks is a company dedicated to protecting the digital way of life through innovative technology. They are seeking a Sr Staff Software Engineer to design and build core systems for their observability platform, focusing on scalable distributed systems and high-volume telemetry data.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build scalable backend services that process high-volume telemetry data
• Develop systems for ingestion, storage, indexing, and querying of time-series and event data
• Improve performance, reliability, and cost efficiency of distributed systems
• Collaborate with frontend teams to design clean, efficient APIs
• Contribute to data modeling strategies for high-cardinality observability workloads
• Participate in architecture reviews and technical design discussions
• Improve system observability (we use our own product heavily) and reliability
• Mentor engineers and help raise engineering standards

Requirements:

• Strong experience in one or more backend languages (e.g., Go, Java, Python, Rust)
• Experience using AI coding assistants (e.g., Cursor, Claude) as part of day-to-day software development
• Experience building and operating highly available systems in production
• Experience working with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Experience designing APIs (REST, gRPC, GraphQL)
• A strong sense of ownership and can independently own projects from inception to delivery
• An effective collaborative working style. We're a small team working in a rapidly evolving space, and we're looking for people that will help build a positive, supportive environment