Principal Software Automation/Test 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 - Own the test architecture. Define and drive the automation strategy for Cortex Cloud services - Build world-class frameworks. Design, implement, and maintain scalable, maintainable test frameworks and tooling in Python, Go, Java, or TypeScript that engineering teams across the organization adopt. - Conquer complex integration environments. Quickly learn unfamiliar systems, then stand up and automate very complex integration environments: multi-cloud accounts, Kubernetes clusters, cloud connectors, data pipelines, scanners, brokers, and third-party integrations. - Make quality part of CI/CD. Build quality gates, test orchestration, ephemeral test environments, and release validation into CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI, Jenkins, Flux, Helm, Terraform) so feedback is fast and reliable. - Test at cloud scale. Lead system, scale, and chaos testing for high-throughput distributed services, and find bottlenecks, race conditions, and failure modes before customers do. - Troubleshoot hard problems. Act as the escalation point for complex test and production-like failures across services, infrastructure, and cloud providers. Drive root-cause analysis using logs, metrics, traces, and data-store queries. - Bring AI into testing. Design and build AI agents and LLM-powered tools for test generation, failure triage, flaky-test detection, log analysis, and environment self-healing. Also define how AI-driven product features get validated. - Set the bar and mentor. Raise engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, and best practices. Mentor senior and staff engineers, and influence technical direction across development, QA, and DevOps teams. - Measure and improve. Define quality metrics such as coverage, escape rate, pipeline health, flakiness, and MTTR, and use the data to improve release quality and speed. Qualifications 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 6 years focused on test automation, quality engineering, or developer productivity for large-scale distributed systems or SaaS - Strong programming skills in at least one of Python, Go, or Java, and the ability to write production-quality code, not just scripts - Proven record of architecting and building test automation frameworks from scratch and scaling them across multiple teams - Deep hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and practices (GitLab CI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or similar), including pipeline design, test parallelization, and environment provisioning - Strong cloud knowledge across GCP, AWS, and Azure: compute, networking, IAM, storage, managed data services, and cloud-native security concepts - Solid experience with containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes/GKE/EKS/AKS) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Helm) - Extensive experience with system, integration, end-to-end, performance, and scale testing of microservices and data pipelines (REST/gRPC APIs, message queues such as Pub/Sub or Kafka, SQL and NoSQL stores, BigQuery or similar) - End-to-end domain expertise across enterprise cybersecurity systems to lead our overall quality and system validation strategy. - Excellent troubleshooting skills across the full stack: application, infrastructure, network, and cloud provider layers, using observability tools such as Cloud Logging, Grafana, and tracing - A demonstrated ability to learn new, complex domains quickly and to deliver in ambiguous, fast-moving environments - Strong communication skills and the ability to influence technical decisions across organizations without direct authority - BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience Big Plus - Hands-on experience building AI agents or LLM-powered applications (for example LangChain, LangGraph, MCP, OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini APIs, RAG, tool calling, multi-agent orchestration) - Experience applying AI/ML to engineering workflows such as automated test generation, intelligent failure triage, or log and anomaly analysis - Experience testing or evaluating AI/LLM-based product features (evaluation frameworks, guardrails, non-deterministic output validation) - Experience with UI automation frameworks (Playwright, Selenium) - Experience with security, resilience, or chaos engineering practices #LI-BL1 Compensation Disclosure The compensation offered for this position will depend on qualifications, experience, and work location. For candidates who receive an offer at the posted level, the starting base salary (for non-sales roles) or base salary + commission target (for sales/com-missioned roles) is expected to be the annual range listed below. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found here . $156,400.00 - $253,000.00/yr 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 [email protected] . 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.