Senior Principal DevOps Engineer

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 Job Summary As a Senior Principal DevOps Engineer, you will act as a deep technical owner of the data platform, building confidence in the reliability, resilience, and correctness of critical data systems. You will serve as a trusted technical partner to SRE, Development teams, and Architects on customer-impacting issues and drive the operational excellence of our most critical data infrastructure. Key Responsibilities Serve as a trusted technical partner to SRE, Development, and Architecture teams on customer-impacting data platform issues, including ingestion delays and data unavailability. Lead data loss prevention, corruption handling, and restore strategies to ensure data integrity and predictable recovery across all stateful systems. Strengthen observability across data platforms by closing gaps in metrics, logging, and alerting to enable faster detection and resolution of complex issues. Drive capacity planning and scalability initiatives for data platform infrastructure, ensuring systems are prepared for future growth and peak demand. Collaborate with SRE and Development teams to automate monitoring and observability capabilities as part of building any new project or system. Mentor team members by providing technical guidance, clear communication, and assurance during incidents and complex operational scenarios. Create and maintain comprehensive runbooks for controlled, repeatable responses to incidents, errors, and systemic failures. Qualifications Required Qualifications Bachelor's degree with 12 years of experience, or Master's degree with 8 years of experience, or PhD with 5 years of experience in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience. Deep specialization in building, operating, and scaling large, complex data platforms and stateful systems, including Kafka, Cassandra, RDS, MemSQL, Redis, and OpenSearch. Strong ability to understand end-to-end distributed systems, data flow across microservices, and common failure modes. Hands-on experience with data integrity, designing predictable backup strategies, and leading data recovery and restore workflows. Strong experience with version control systems (e.g., Git) for managing infrastructure, scripts, and operational tooling. Preferred Qualifications Proven ability to troubleshoot complex, product-specific data issues and operate at equal technical depth with Development teams and Architects. Experience implementing large-scale monitoring initiatives and embedding observability early using configuration-as-code approaches. Strong communication and influence skills, with the ability to engage with both technical and non-technical stakeholders across all levels. Demonstrated ability to learn, evaluate, and apply new technologies as systems and p ... (truncated, view full listing at source)