Senior Customer 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

Senior Customer Engineer - Strata Cloud Manager (SCM)

Your Career

The Customer Engineering (CE) team is an exciting crossroads between Global Customer Support (GCS), Product Engineering, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), bridging the gap between customer-facing Technical Assistance Center (TAC) teams and backend Engineering.

As a Senior Customer Engineer, you will drive technical investigations for critical customer escalations and other complex issues involving our SaaS and cloud security offerings, including Strata Cloud Manager (SCM) and Strata Logging Service.

You will partner closely with customers, TAC, and Engineering bridging the gap between customer-facing teams and our backend cloud infrastructure and Engineering. You will also leverage AI, automation, and engineering tools to improve troubleshooting efficiency and define supportability requirements to reduce recurring issues.

You are a good candidate if you thrive in cloud-native environments, have a strong troubleshooting mindset, communicate effectively under pressure, and enjoy understanding why systems behave the way they do.

Your Impact

• Escalation Leadership: Own technical investigations and resolution of critical and complex customer escalations. Coordinate troubleshooting across TAC, Engineering, and SRE, participate in live customer and internal incident bridges, and collaborate with designated incident commanders to accelerate resolution.
• Engineering Collaboration: Work directly with developers, SRE, DevOps, QA, and Product Management as an expert advisor during the design and later Product Life Cycle phases. Establish a regular cadence and process to define supportability, telemetry, and usability requirements. Maintain visibility into ongoing Engineering investigations, drive continuous product improvements and ensure effective collaboration between TAC and Engineering.
• Advanced Troubleshooting & Root Cause Analysis: Investigate issues involving SaaS infrastructure, cloud environments, backend services, APIs, security enforcement, control planes, AI gateways, and traffic flows. Analyze logs, telemetry, configurations, and system behavior to identify root causes and contribute to post-incident reviews and preventive actions.
• AI & Agentic Workflows: Leverage AI tools and agentic workflows to accelerate troubleshooting, analyze logs, develop scripts, and automate repetitive tasks. Create tools and automation to help solve support challenges at scale, applying technical judgment to validate AI-generated outputs and follow security requirements.
• Supportability & Continuous Improvement: Identify recurring escalation patterns, diagnostic gaps, and product limitations. Actively look for opportunities to catch problems before they escalate or become widespread.
• Issue Reproduction & Validation: Build or adapt cloud-based lab environments to reproduce customer issues and validate fixes when feasible. Use backend logs, telemetry, API investigations, and Engineering collaboration for issues that cannot be reproduced in a lab.
• TAC Enablement & Knowledge Sharing: Develop troubleshooting playbooks and AI Copilot knowledge inputs. Provide targeted training, technical guidance, and knowledge-sharing sessions to enable TAC teams. This includes structured training throughout the year, as well as ad hoc sessions and Q&A (live and via Zoom). Maintain regular office hours with support teams to facilitate collaboration, knowledge sharing, and faster issue resolution.
• Adaptability & Initiative:  Take ownership of emerging technical challenges, adapt to evolving products and responsibilities. Champion unplanned projects that result in a better customer experience, and proactively identify opportunities to improve customer support and engineering workflows.

Your Experience

Required Qualifications

• Professional Background: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field with at least 5 years of relevant experience, or a Master's degree with at least 3 years of relevant experience. Equivalent practical experience may also be considered.
• Troubleshooting & Escalations: Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills, with experience investigating complex technical issues and handling critical escalations in enterprise environments. Ability to work effectively under pressure and coordinate investigations across multiple teams.
• Communication skills: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience communicating technical findings, managing customer expectations, and engaging with enterprise customers and internal stakeholders. Translating technical information for other Engineers and Executive teams is an essential part of the job.
• Cloud & SaaS Knowledge: Understanding of enterprise SaaS architectures, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and operational workflows. Experience with at least one major cloud platform such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Scripting, Automation, and AI: Comfortable with Python, JSON, REST APIs, Linux/Unix environments, SQL, SDKs, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) to automate lab deployments and build custom troubleshooting scripts. Proficiency with SOTA AI models (such as Claude and ChatGPT) in coding and engineering workflows. Experience developing AI-assisted troubleshooting workflows, automation agents, or internal engineering tools is highly desired.
• SaaS/SRE/DevOps Knowledge: Familiarity or experience with enterprise SaaS application backend systems, DevOps, SRE, and CI/CD pipelines is required.
• Networking & Security Fundamentals: Solid understanding of TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/HTTPS, SSL/TLS, certificates, routing, and general network troubleshooting.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Experience working with Technical Support, Engineering, SRE, DevOps, or Product Management to investigate and resolve complex technical issues.
• Adaptability: Comfortable working in a dynamic environment, learning new technologies, and taking on evolving responsibilities.
• On-Call Availability: Willingness to participate in rotating on-call shifts and provide technical escalation support during occasional evenings and weekends. Experience with incident management processes is beneficial. Familiarity with incident management tools such as PagerDuty or FireHydrant is preferred.

Preferred Qualifications

• PAN-OS Expertise: Hands-on experience with Palo Alto Networks products, particularly Software Firewalls, Strata Cloud Manager (SCM), Prisma AIRS/Portkey, Prisma SASE, or SD-WAN. Knowledge of core NGFW capabilities such as App-ID, User-ID, Threat Prevention, and URL Filtering across physical, virtual, and cloud-delivered environments.
• Cloud Networking: Experience with cloud security management platforms, multi-tenant architectures, centralized policy distribution, or AI security inspection and enforcement. Familiarity with cloud networking constructs such as VPCs, VNETs, Transit Gateways, Gateway Load Balancers, Application Load Balancers, and route tables.
• Familiarity with observability technologies such as Grafana, Prometheus, distributed tracing, or equivalent logging and monitoring platforms.
• Experience with cloud-based lab environments, root cause analysis (RCA), post-incident reviews, and technical enablement.

The Team

Customer Engineering is a specialized technical team that is critical to our success and mission. Our technical team provides behind-the-scenes support to meet our customer’s needs. You’ll be involved in implementing new products, transitioning from old products to new, and fixing integrations and critical issues as they are raised. In fact, you’ll proactively seek them out to ensure our clients are safely supported. We value technical curiosity, ownership, collaboration, and the ability to adapt to new challenges. Our engineers are encouraged to look beyond individual incidents, challenge existing processes, and develop solutions that improve how we support customers at scale.

We’re a fast-growing, immensely successful organization because of our people and products. We define the industry instead of waiting for directions. We need individuals who feel comfortable in ambiguity, are excited by the prospect of a challenge, and feel empowered to mitigate the unknown risks facing our everyday lives that are enabled by a secure digital environment.

Qualifications

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?: Yes