Senior Staff Software 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

We are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to own medium-sized features in our connectors framework from design through production. In this role, you will work independently on diverse problems that require weighing many factors, and you will find simple solutions that keep the framework easy to maintain. You will write the designs for features in your component, rewrite modules with a solid grasp of the overall architecture, and mentor junior engineers along the way.

What You’ll Do

• Own Medium-Sized Framework Features: Take a framework feature from design to production. Examples include checkpoint and resume for long-running syncs, per-credential rate limiting, or write-operation support in the no-code connector framework.

• Design Within Your Component: Write functional and design specifications for features in your area of the framework, and argue your design decisions in reviews.

• Break Down Ambiguity: Turn vague or complex requirements into simple, well-scoped pieces, and keep making progress when the path is unclear.

• Rewrite and Improve Modules: Refactor or rewrite framework modules and services, with a solid understanding of the overall architecture, performance, deployment, and debugging.

• Protect Data Accuracy: Make sure the features you build handle deletions, partial failures, and retries without corrupting the identity inventory.

• Debug Complex Issues: Fix complicated framework issues and customer escalations, and join support calls alongside senior engineers and PM.

• Apply AI-First Practices: Build AI-assisted workflows for your component, and rigorously evaluate AI-generated code and configuration to prevent hallucinations, security gaps, and logic defects.

• Practice Secure Engineering: Handle customer credentials, tokens, and tenant isolation correctly in everything you build, and resolve security findings in your area.

• Mentor on Quality: Mentor junior engineers on code quality, testing, and documentation.

• Deliver on Commitments: Do what it takes, including sensible trade-offs, to deliver on time.

Nice to Have

• Identity & Access Security Domain: Direct experience with IAM, PAM, IGA, or Secrets Management platforms. Familiarity with SCIM or entitlement modeling.

• Declarative Integration Frameworks: Experience extending low-code or no-code integration platforms, or transformation languages such as JSONata or JSONPath.

• Workflow & Job Orchestration: Experience with distributed job schedulers, queues, or durable workflow engines, such as Agenda, SQS, Kafka, or Temporal.

• Hybrid Connectivity: Experience with agents or gateways that run inside customer networks and connect back to a cloud service.

• Quality & Observability Tooling: Fluency with Jest or Vitest, contract testing, JMeter for load testing, and monitoring tools such as Datadog.

Impact

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the connectors framework, you will be a go-to engineer for your area of the platform. The features you own will shape how accurately and reliably identity data reaches our product. Your impact will be measured by the quality and durability of the features you deliver, how well you handle ambiguity, and the growth of the engineers you mentor.

Qualifications

• Backend Mastery: Deep hands-on experience building enterprise-grade services with Node.js, TypeScript, Express.js, and MongoDB.

• Data Sync & Pipelines: Experience building data sync or ETL pipelines that handle idempotency, retries, pagination, and rate limits.

• Integration Protocols: Practical experience with REST, SCIM 2.0, GraphQL, and SOAP APIs, plus OAuth 2.0 and other enterprise authentication schemes.

• Cloud Experience: Experience building and operating services on AWS.

• Design Documentation: Able to write clear functional and design specifications that explain trade-offs.

• Production Debugging: Experience debugging complicated production issues and customer cases.

• Development Processes: Expert understanding of development processes and tools, including issue tracking, source control, and CI/CD.

• AI Tooling & Output Verification: Expertise in prompt and context engineering, with peer-review rigor to verify AI output for correctness and security.

• Customer Understanding: Good understanding of customer use cases, problems, and considerations.

Qualifications

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, plea