Senior DevOps Engineer - Backend Infrastructure Team (Cortex)

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
We are looking for a highly skilled Senior DevOps Engineer to join our Backend Infrastructure Team within the Cortex Group. Operating at the intersection of deep platform engineering and high-scale production reliability, this high-visibility role acts as a vital bridge between our DevOps organization and the Cortex Platform team - embedded closely with dev and infrastructure groups to drive broad technical impact.
Your Impact
Production Ownership: Drive end-to-end ownership, reliability, and scaling of a high-scale production SaaS environment deployed on GCP.
Infrastructure & Automation: Design and execute Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform) to orchestrate production and dev environments, building CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins) and automated remediation tools.
Taking part of a highly skilled team, which spans from customer facing features to databases configuration and HA & DR ownership.
Platform & Data Governance: Partner with development teams to optimize distributed platform components, backend architectures, and databases.
Cross-Organizational Leadership: Collaborate with application teams, QA, and leadership to drive technical standards, platform efficiency, cost optimizations, and cross-team processes.
Platform backend shared components and architecture
On-Call Responsibilities
Participate in an on-call rotation (including weekends and holidays) supporting mission-critical Cortex platform infrastructure.
Apply strong investigative skills to troubleshoot production issues, connect complex symptoms across distributed systems, and drive root-cause resolution.
Lead customer-facing Root Cause Analyses (RCAs), translating complex technical findings into actionable post-mortem improvements.
Qualifications
Your Experience:
5+ years of hands-on experience in a DevOps, Platform, or Site Reliability Engineering role managing high-scale production environments.
Cloud & Orchestration: High proficiency with cloud (preferably GCP), Kubernetes, Docker, and infrastructure automation using Terraform.
Development & Scripting: Strong software engineering mindset with solid proficiency in Python (Go is a plus).
Operating Systems & Networking: Deep proficiency with Linux internals, troubleshooting, and system performance tuning.
Technical Leadership: Proven ability to lead complex technical designs, drive cross-functional projects, and communicate effectively with stakeholders across R&D.
Nice to have:
Database Infrastructure: Hands-on experience working with databases (MySQL, Postgres, Redis, etc.). HA & DR.
AI Integration: Experience incorporating AI into daily workflows (CI/CD, automated debugging agents, architecture design).
Security Domain: Prior experience in the cybersecurity field or implementing cloud security tools.
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, please contact us at accommodations@paloaltonetworks.com.
Palo Alto Networks is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity in our workplace, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or other legally protected characteristics.
All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.
Is role eligible for Immigration Sponsorship? No. Please note that we will not sponsor applicants for work visas for this position.