# Sr Principal Software Engineer - ADEM (Backend) at Palo Alto Networks

- Company: Palo Alto Networks
- What the company does: Implement Zero Trust, Secure your Network, Cloud workloads, Hybrid Workforce, Leverage Threat Intelligence & Security Consulting. Cybersecurity Services & Education for CISO’s, Head of Infrastructure, Network Security Engineers, Cloud Architects & SOC Managers. Backed by Greylock, Sequoia and Felicis.
- Company website: https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/
- Type: Startups
- Level: Principal and up
- Location: Santa Clara, United States of America
- Work setup: On-site
- Posted: 2026-09-10
- Apply by: 2026-10-25
- Apply: https://paloaltonetworks.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/panwexternalcareers/job/Santa-Clara-United-States-of-America/Distinguished-Software-Engineer---ADEM--Backend-_JR-018648
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/palo-alto-networks-sr-principal-software-engineer-adem-backend/

## About the role

Technical Strategy & Roadmap: Define the long-term architectural vision for ADEM backend services, ensuring scalability to support hundreds of millions of global endpoints and multi-petabyte telemetry streams. Architectural Governance: Lead the "Design Review Board" for the ADEM org, ensuring that all new services adhere to Secure AI by Design, high-availability patterns, and cost-efficient GCP utilization.

## What they're looking for

- 12+ years of software engineering experience, with a significant portion dedicated to designing and operating large-scale distributed systems in a cloud-native environment
- Distributed Systems Mastery: Proven track record of architecting systems that handle billions of events per day with strict sub-second latency requirements using Rust ,Go (Golang), Java, or Python
- GCP Principal-Level Expertise: Deep authoritative knowledge of the GCP ecosystem (GKE, Spanner, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Dataflow) and the ability to optimize cloud spend through sophisticated architectural choices (FinOps)
- Data Plane Innovation: Experience building high-throughput, low-latency data pipelines using technologies like Kafka, Pulsar, or Flink
- Security & Networking Visionary: Deep understanding of Zero Trust architecture, L4-L7 networking, and advanced encryption standards to ensure ADEM remains the most secure platform in the industry
- Open Source & Community: A history of contributing to open-source projects (e.g., Kubernetes, Prometheus, Istio) or speaking at industry conferences is highly desirable


Source: 1752vc Careers, https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/palo-alto-networks-sr-principal-software-engineer-adem-backend/