Principal Software Escalation Engineer

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks were united by a shared missionto 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 youre ready to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who are just as passionate as you are youre 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!

Job Summary

*This role can be filled anywhere in the United States*

Were looking for a Principal Escalation Engineer to serve as a key architect of customer stability and product maturity within the Jupiter Group. This is a high-impact cross-functional leadership role that sits at the intersection of R&D Product and Customer Success. You will not just resolve issues you will fundamentally shape how our products are designed built and delivered.

You will act as the Voice of the Customer within the engineering lifecycle influencing architectural decisions to ensure our solutions are not only robust but also intuitive to deploy and manage. By treating supportability and onboarding as core product features you will protect R&D capacity accelerate delivery and ensure our innovations succeed in the real world.

What Youll Do

• Voice of the Customer in Design (Shift Left): Join discovery and design sessions to validate proposed features against real-world customer use cases. You will provide critical feedback on design and UX before development begins flagging if a feature will be difficult to implement fails to address specific edge cases or introduces friction that hinders adoption.
• Define Holistic Product & Supportability Requirements: Go beyond standard logging; define the capabilities needed to streamline the entire customer journey. This includes specifying requirements for smoother product onboarding self-service troubleshooting tools and connectivity checks (e.g. demanding a prerequisite script for connector installation or built-in latency monitoring between components).
• Own the R&D Escalation Strategy: Act as the single accountable authority for technical escalations replacing reactive ping-pong with a structured predictive pipeline that restores delivery predictability to the sprint teams.
• Drive Operational Excellence: Transform how we monitor and maintain health by owning the logic behind PagerDuty alerts reducing noise and defining the Definition of Ready for operational handoffs.
• Empower the Support Organization: Act as a force multiplier by leading high-level training and knowledge transfer enabling Support to resolve complex issues independently and lowering the escalation rate.
• Lead Incident Lifecycle & CAPA: Drive the post-incident process ensuring that every failure results in a systemic improvement whether its a code fix a documentation update or a process change.
• Influence the Roadmap: Use data from the field (trends escaped bugs and friction points) to drive strategic roadmap decisions ensuring we prioritize technical debt and usability improvements alongside new features.

#LI-KR1

Qualifications

What You Bring

• 8 years of experience in the software industry (Technical Support R&D or Sustaining Engineering).
• A Product-Engineering Mindset: You can look at a technical design and immediately foresee how a customer will struggle with it. You care deeply about the user experience not just the code execution.
• 5 years of hands-on experience troubleshooting complex SaaS/Cloud environments (AWS preferred).
• Strong technical depth (scripting in Python/Bash/Go reading code SQL) to investigate issues independently and build tooling.
• Exceptional communication and leadership skills: You can challenge a Product Manager on a use case or guide a developer on a logging standard with equal confidence.
• Proven ability to drive cross-team initiatives and influence stakeholders without direct authority.
• Highly self-motivated with a strong sense of ownership and accountability.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in the Cyber Security domain.
• Background in Customer Success Engineering or Solutions Engineering.
• Experience defining architectural standards for observability and deployability.
• Experience defining Definition of Ready processes for escalation handling.

Join us to be the customers advocate in the room where decisions happen. Your vision will directly impact the quality usability and success of CyberArks next-generation cloud 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/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.

Our Commitment

Were trailblazers that dream big 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.