Senior Manager, Performance Engineering (Cortex Cloud)

Your Career

We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Senior Manager Performance Engineering to lead our global performance engineering organization. This role will drive strategy execution and innovation in performance testing benchmarking capacity planning and system optimization for large-scale distributed cloud platforms. The successful candidate will build and lead a high-performing team that partners with engineering product DevOps and architecture groups to ensure our products meet and exceed customer expectations for speed scalability resiliency and efficiency.

Responsibilities

• Leadership & Strategy
   

  • Define and execute the performance engineering strategy across products platforms and services.

  • Establish key performance metrics SLAs and success criteria aligned with customer and business needs.

  • Build and scale a global team of performance engineers fostering innovation accountability and excellence.
     

• Engineering & Execution
   

  • Oversee the design and development of performance test frameworks automation tools and simulation environments for end-to-end system testing.

  • Drive benchmarking and profiling of distributed systems under realistic load and stress scenarios.

  • Collaborate with engineering and architecture teams to identify bottlenecks and provide tuning recommendations for backend frontend APIs databases and infrastructure.

  • Ensure performance engineering is integrated early in the SDLC (shift-left approach).
     

• Cross-Functional Collaboration
   

  • Partner with product management and architects to define scalability goals and capacity models.

  • Work with DevOps/SRE to ensure production readiness observability and monitoring align with performance standards.

  • Provide leadership in incident investigations involving performance and scalability issues in production.
     

• Innovation & Continuous Improvement
   

  • Champion performance best practices methodologies and metrics across the organization.

  • Introduce AI-driven performance insights predictive modeling and automated anomaly detection.

  • Continuously evaluate emerging tools technologies and practices to evolve the performance engineering strategy.

Qualifications :

Your Experience 

• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science Engineering or a related field (or equivalent experience).

• 10 years of experience in software engineering or quality engineering with at least 5 years in performance engineering.

• 5 years of experience managing and scaling high-performing engineering teams.

• Strong expertise in distributed systems microservices cloud platforms (AWS Azure GCP) and container technologies (Kubernetes Docker).

• Proficiency in performance tools and frameworks (e.g. JMeter Gatling Locust k6 LoadRunner custom frameworks).

• Deep understanding of system profiling database tuning caching and network optimization.

• Strong communication leadership and stakeholder management skills.

• Experience introducing innovative approaches (e.g. ML/AI-driven performance analysis chaos engineering).

Why Join Us

• Opportunity to lead a critical function that impacts customer experience and business growth.

• Work on cutting-edge cloud-scale challenges with a talented global team.

• Drive innovation in performance engineering automation and AI-driven insights.

• Collaborate with leaders across engineering product and operations to shape the future of our platform.

Additional Information :

The Team

Why Join Us

• Opportunity to lead a critical function that impacts customer experience and business growth.

• Work on cutting-edge cloud-scale challenges with a talented global team.

• Drive innovation in performance engineering automation and AI-driven insights.

• Collaborate with leaders across engineering product and operations to shape the future of our platform.

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/commissioned roles) is expected to be between $185000 - $275000. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found here.

Our Commitment

Were problem solvers that take risks and challenge cybersecuritys status quo. Its simple: we cant 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  .

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.

Remote Work :

No

Employment Type :

Full-time