Sr. Principal Software Engineer - Backend, Identity & Access Management (Chronosphere)

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! This role is remote, but distance is no barrier to impact. Our hybrid teams collaborate across geographies to solve big problems, stay close to our customers, and grow together. You will be part of a culture that values trust, accountability, and shared success where your work truly matters. Job Summary The Team Chronosphere, a Palo Alto Networks company, is the observability platform built for control in the modern, containerized world. Chronosphere empowers customers to focus on the data and insights that matter by reducing complexity, optimizing costs, and remediating issues faster. Chronosphere reduces data volumes and associated costs by 84% on average while saving developers thousands of hours. Recognized as a leader by major analyst firms, Chronosphere is trusted by the world's most innovative brands, including DoorDash, Affirm, and Zillow. Job Summary The Identity & Access Management team owns our authentication and access control platform: the APIs, libraries, services, and data stores other engineering teams integrate with to control who can do what in their part of the product. Other teams write the access rules for their own features. This team builds the system they plug into. We are increasing our investment in this area, and the team is growing rapidly. These systems sit in front of every dashboard, API, and piece of customer data, so reliability and security posture come first. Much of our roadmap is customer-driven too: access control granularity, SSO and SCIM coverage, and service account scoping come up during procurement and renewal. We are seeking a senior technical leader for this platform. You will set the architectural direction, lead the most complex and highest stakes work, stay hands-on with the code, and mentor other engineers on the team. Qualifications Key Responsibilities Lead and evolve the design of our granular access control framework: a sophisticated, scalable, and reliable system that nearly every other product team integrates with. Set the architectural direction for the platform on a 1-3 year horizon, including APIs for other teams, shippable iterations, build-versus-buy decisions, how we manage technical debt, and how to scale reliably. Lead initiatives that span teams. Much of this work lands in code other teams own, so negotiating priorities, resolving dependencies, and influencing peers without authority matter alongside technical skills. Ship and maintain platform capabilities in Go, deployed on Kubernetes across cloud platforms such as AWS and GCP. This is a hands-on role, and you will take on the parts of the system that are the most complex and most frequently used. Own the reliability of these systems in production. Monitor SLOs and take timely action to meet our reliability goals. Identify security and reliability risks, and build systems to address and mitigate them.  Eliminate systemic failure modes and toil through architectural, deployment, and tooling improvements to keep this platform safe to change. Partner with your product manager to assess customer needs and co-create the roadmap. Your PM owns direction. You ground it in what is buildable. Both of you bring empathy for the admins who live in these systems every day, so you can tell which access control gaps are genuinely blocking customers. Balance large investments alongside a steady cadence of customer requests while making sure the team can deliver at a predictable pace. Partner with the teams who will build on what you ship. Build relationships and engage them early and often to stay connected to our needs in the organization. Work with our security and compliance partners on reviews, audits, and realistic commitments we make to customers. Track where identity and access management is heading outside the company, including new security models and the access control questions AI agents raise, and turn that into technical bets we can act on. Mentor engineers on this team and elsewhere in the organization. Help us grow the team by interviewing and onboarding new engineers into a challenging domain. Required Qualifications A track record of taking an ambitious vision from an idea to production. The ability to work through ambiguity collaboratively with customers and partners toward iterative execution. Experience owning initiatives that span several teams from inception to delivery, working alongside product managers, designers, and other engineers. Experience with large scale distributed systems, and the judgment to weigh reliability, scalability, security, cost, and time-to-market trade-offs. Strong product sense. You hold a technical and a product point of view at the same time. You can tell which gaps in a platform capability change what a customer is actually able to do, and you turn customer and contractual requirements into engineering priorities rather than waiting for them to be handed to you. You use data to make the case for architectural investment. Experience building