Senior Staff Software Engineer – Test Infrastructure, Automation & Performance

Job description

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 Your Career 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. Our Machine Identity platform secures identities, certificates, and cryptographic assets for many of the world's largest enterprises. As organizations increasingly rely on distributed systems and cloud-native applications, ensuring these products perform reliably across complex enterprise environments is critical. We're looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer to build the automation frameworks, performance tooling, and enterprise validation infrastructure that enable our engineering teams to deliver secure, scalable, and highly reliable software. This is a hands-on software engineering role where you'll write production-quality code every day to build automation for backend services, distributed systems, and enterprise infrastructure. Rather than focusing on traditional UI test automation, you'll engineer the frameworks, tooling, and environments that validate complex enterprise deployments at scale. If you've built automation, performance, or validation frameworks for enterprise software, networking, PKI, identity, cloud infrastructure, or cybersecurity products, we'd love to hear from you. Your Impact As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, you will: • Design, develop, and maintain automation frameworks for backend services, distributed systems, and cloud-native applications. • Build software that provisions, configures, and manages enterprise-scale validation environments. • Develop automation that validates functionality, scalability, resiliency, performance, security, and operational readiness. • Simulate complex customer environments spanning Linux, Windows, networking, PKI, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, and distributed architectures. • Partner closely with Development, DevOps, and Security Engineering teams to ensure products are designed for scalability, reliability, observability, and testability. • Enhance CI/CD pipelines and engineering tooling that improve developer productivity and release confidence. • Analyze and debug complex issues spanning software, infrastructure, networking, operating systems, cloud services, and distributed applications. • Participate in architecture reviews, technical design discussions, and code reviews while mentoring engineers on software engineering and automation best practices. Qualifications • 5+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET), Performance Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or a related technical discipline. • Strong software engineering skills developing production-quality software using Python, Java, Go, or other modern programming languages, including experience building reusable libraries, frameworks, APIs, or tooling. Experience across multiple programming languages is highly valued. • Experience designing and building automation and integration testing frameworks for backend services, APIs, distributed systems, cloud-native applications, or enterprise software. • Strong understanding of test strategy across unit, integration, system, end-to-end, performance, scalability, resiliency, and security testing, including how to determine the appropriate level of validation within a modern CI/CD environment. • Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, REST APIs, and modern software architectures. • Experience with Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), X.509 certificates, SSL/TLS, certificate lifecycle management, Certificate Authorities, Machine Identity technologies, or adjacent security and identity concepts is highly valued. Candidates with strong systems, networking, or infrastructure depth and the ability to quickly learn the domain will also be considered. • Strong understanding of networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/S, TLS, certificate-based authentication, and secure communications. • Hands-on Linux experience, including command-line troubleshooting, system and process investigation, networking diagnostics, and debugging applications or services in Linux environments, along with experience working in Windows environments. • Hands-on experience with containerized applications using Docker and Kubernetes. • Strong understanding of end-to-end CI/CD workflows, including build, automated testing, quality gates, deployment, rollback, release readiness, and integration with production delivery processes. Experience designing, implementing, or maintaining pipelines using GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, or similar technologies is required. • Experience buil