Principal Software Escalation Engineer

Palo Alto Networks is a cybersecurity company focused on protecting digital environments through innovative technology. The Principal Software Escalation Engineer will serve as the voice of the customer across engineering, product, and customer success, driving product supportability, technical escalation strategy, operational excellence, incident improvement, and roadmap influence.

Responsibilities:

• Voice of the Customer in Design (Shift Left): Join discovery and design sessions to validate proposed features against real-world customer use cases. You will provide critical feedback on design and UX before development begins, flagging if a feature will be difficult to implement, fails to address specific edge cases, or introduces friction that hinders adoption
• Define Holistic Product & Supportability Requirements: Go beyond standard logging; define the capabilities needed to streamline the entire customer journey. This includes specifying requirements for smoother product onboarding, self-service troubleshooting tools, and connectivity checks (e.g., demanding a prerequisite script for connector installation or built-in latency monitoring between components)
• Own the R&D Escalation Strategy: Act as the single accountable authority for technical escalations, replacing reactive "ping-pong" with a structured, predictive pipeline that restores delivery predictability to the sprint teams
• Drive Operational Excellence: Transform how we monitor and maintain health by owning the logic behind PagerDuty alerts, reducing noise, and defining the "Definition of Ready" for operational handoffs
• Empower the Support Organization: Act as a force multiplier by leading high-level training and knowledge transfer, enabling Support to resolve complex issues independently and lowering the escalation rate
• Lead Incident Lifecycle & CAPA: Drive the post-incident process, ensuring that every failure results in a systemic improvement, whether it’s a code fix, a documentation update, or a process change
• Influence the Roadmap: Use data from the field (trends, escaped bugs, and friction points) to drive strategic roadmap decisions, ensuring we prioritize technical debt and usability improvements alongside new features

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience in the software industry (Technical Support, R&D, or Sustaining Engineering)
• A "Product-Engineering" Mindset: You can look at a technical design and immediately foresee how a customer will struggle with it. You care deeply about the user experience, not just the code execution
• 5+ years of hands-on experience troubleshooting complex SaaS/Cloud environments (AWS preferred)
• Strong technical depth (scripting in Python/Bash/Go, reading code, SQL) to investigate issues independently and build tooling
• Exceptional communication and leadership skills: You can challenge a Product Manager on a use case or guide a developer on a logging standard with equal confidence
• Proven ability to drive cross-team initiatives and influence stakeholders without direct authority
• Highly self-motivated with a strong sense of ownership and accountability
• Experience in the Cyber Security domain
• Background in Customer Success Engineering or Solutions Engineering
• Experience defining architectural standards for observability and deployability
• Experience defining "Definition of Ready" processes for escalation handling