Welcome to the Platform Engineering DevEx group-the driving force behind Palo Alto internal developer platform! We are entering an exciting era of growth and innovation, building out specialized pillars to champion a truly world-class developer experience. We are looking for an inspiring Principal Platform Engineer to serve as our technical anchor, visionary, and culture-builder.
In this role, you will have the unique opportunity to elevate the way hundreds of developers worldwide build, deploy, and thrive every single day. You wont just build tools; you will cultivate an environment of empowerment and high velocity. By defining the "North Star" vision for our internal platform as a premium SaaS product, you will transform the "Frontend of DevOps" (Self-Service Portals, Automations, and Insights) into a seamless, joyful experience that engineers love to use. If you are passionate about cutting-edge cloud tech, delighting internal users, and bridging big-picture strategy with engineering excellence, wed love to have you build the future with us.
Your Impact:
Architect the Internal Developer Portal (IDP) Vision: Define the multi-year architectural blueprint and technology stack for our IDP. You will ensure the platform is highly scalable, extensible, and abstracts complex multi-cloud operations into a frictionless, elegant developer experience.
Govern the Enterprise "Golden Path": Standardize and govern the backend logic and API frameworks used for self-service infrastructure. You will design the foundational plugins and paving strategies that allow global R&D teams to scaffold services, provision secure cloud resources, and manage permissions autonomously.
Champion Data-Driven Engineering Culture: Own the strategy for "Service Maturity Scorecards" and organizational insights. You will design systems to aggregate and analyze data from across the entire SDLC toolchain (GitHub, Jira, Artifactory), providing executive leadership and engineering directors with clear visibility into global DORA metrics, velocity, and quality.
Design Resilient Enterprise Integrations: Architect the overarching event-driven automation framework that seamlessly glues our global toolchain together (Kubernetes, GitHub, LaunchDarkly, Artifactory). You will drive the elimination of "TicketOps" across the company, replacing it with resilient, silent, background automation.
Drive Platform Evangelism & InnerSourcing:Act as the primary advocate for the platform across Palo Alto global R&D organization. You will gather feedback from engineering leaders, cultivate an InnerSource culture where other teams contribute to the platform, and mentor senior engineers within the DevEx pillar.
Requirements: Your Experience:
10+ years of experience in Software Engineering, DevOps, or Platform Engineering, with at least 3 years in a Principal, Staff, or Enterprise Architect role.
Expert Programming Skills: Deep mastery of Python or Go (Golang), with a proven track record of designing large-scale distributed systems, SDKs, or internal frameworks.
Cloud Architecture at Scale: Extensive experience architecting secure, resilient, and cost-effective AWS solutions (Serverless, compute, and multi-account strategies).
Advanced GitOps & CI/CD Governance: Proven experience designing enterprise-grade CI/CD pipelines and scaling GitOps workflows (ArgoCD or Flux) across complex, multi-tenant environments.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Leadership: Mastery of IaC (Terraform, Pulumi, or OpenTofu), including experience building reusable, secure module libraries used by dozens of engineering teams.
Preferred Qualifications
Education: BSc/MSc in Computer Science or elite tech unit graduate (MAMRAM/8200).
Community & Thought Leadership: Active contributor to the CNCF/open-source community or speaker at industry conferences (DevOpsDays, KubeCon, etc.).
This position is open to all candidates.