Palo Alto Networks

Principal Software Escalation Engineer

Palo Alto Networks$147K — $237K *
Information Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 8+ years of experience in the software industry (Technical Support, R&D, or Sustaining Engineering)
  • A 'Product-Engineering' Mindset to foresee user struggles in technical designs
  • 5+ years of hands-on experience troubleshooting complex SaaS/Cloud environments (AWS preferred)
  • Strong technical skills in scripting (Python/Bash/Go), reading code, and SQL
  • Exceptional communication and leadership skills for cross-functional collaboration
  • Proven track record in driving initiatives and influencing without authority
  • Highly self-motivated with ownership and accountability

Responsibilities

  • Join discovery sessions to provide customer feedback on proposed features
  • Define requirements for streamlined customer onboarding and self-service tools
  • Own the R&D escalation strategy to ensure predictable delivery
  • Transform monitoring processes and define operational handoffs
  • Lead training initiatives to empower the Support Organization
  • Drive post-incident processes for continuous improvement
  • Analyze field data to influence roadmap decisions

Benefits

  • Flexible remote work option
  • Opportunities for professional development and training
  • Supportive work culture emphasizing collaboration
  • Leadership role with significant influence on product design and user experience
  • Impactful position directly tied to customer satisfaction and product improvements
Full Job Description
Job Summary

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

We're 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 You'll 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 it's 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 customer's advocate in the room where decisions happen. Your vision will directly impact the quality, usability, and success of CyberArk's 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.

$147,000.00 - $237,500.00/yr

About Palo Alto Networks

Palo Alto Networks, Inc. is an American multinational cybersecurity company with headquarters in Santa Clara, California. Its core products are a platform that includes advanced firewalls and cloud-based offerings that extend those firewalls to cover other aspects of security. The company serves over 70,000 organizations in over 150 countries, including 85 of the Fortune 100. It is home to the Unit 42 threat research team and hosts the Ignite cybersecurity conference.
Learn more about Palo Alto Networks
Size
11,870 employees
Market Cap
$42.6 billion
Industry
Net Income
-$368.2 million
Founded
2005
5 Year Trend
+25.7%
Revenue
$3.7 billion
NASDAQ

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