Senior Staff SDET

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 We're looking for a Senior Staff Engineer who is passionate about building high-impact internal tools and test infrastructure for complex distributed systems. This isn't a traditional QA role—you'll be a hands-on technical leader building automation frameworks and internal platforms that enable product teams to test faster, better, and more reliably. Our product emulates complex, real-world customer environments across a wide range of operating systems, networks, and configurations. You will play a critical role in ensuring quality by designing and building infrastructure, emulating enterprise environments, and developing engineering-focused tools that streamline testing across cloud-native microservices. What We're Looking For We're seeking a curious, independent systems thinker with a builder's mindset—someone who doesn't just write tests but creates reusable tools and frameworks that developers trust. You're proactive, eager to dive deep into complex systems, and comfortable leading technically challenging initiatives from design through implementation. Strong collaboration across Development, DevOps, and Security teams is essential as you help shape scalable testing solutions that improve engineering productivity and product quality. In this role, you will have the opportunity to: Design and implement scalable automation frameworks and tooling for validating cloud-native services. Build reusable components for provisioning, configuring, and managing enterprise-scale test environments across Linux and Windows systems. Own and enhance CI/CD pipelines supporting internal testing infrastructure using GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, or similar technologies. Emulate complex customer environments, including DNS, PKI, firewall configurations, certificate lifecycle management, identity systems, and diverse operating system distributions. Partner with Development, DevOps, and Security teams to ensure services are designed with testability, scalability, and operational reliability in mind. Participate in architecture discussions, technical design reviews, and code reviews to improve automation infrastructure and engineering efficiency. Advocate for continuous testing and collaborate with development teams to promote quality engineering best practices throughout the software development lifecycle. Mentor engineers on designing testable, scalable features and guide teams in selecting the appropriate testing strategies to support efficient deployment pipelines. Identify quality gaps and drive improvements to automation coverage, reliability, and developer workflows. Design, implement, and maintain automation frameworks, internal tooling, and test infrastructure that enable engineering teams to deliver software with confidence. Work closely with engineering teams and product owners to ensure features are designed with clear, testable acceptance criteria and quality built into the development process. Review and influence testing strategies for complex features and distributed systems. Support developers in designing and building sophisticated end-to-end testing scenarios. Analyze quality trends and drive improvements that increase engineering efficiency, product quality, and release confidence. Why Join Us? Work on real-world infrastructure: Our testing emulates enterprise environments with diverse operating systems, networks, PKI infrastructure, and cloud-native services. You'll solve challenging engineering problems—not toy examples. Build platforms that engineers rely on: Design automation frameworks and internal tooling that improve developer productivity across multiple teams. Collaborate with a highly technical team: Work alongside engineers building large-scale distributed systems within Palo Alto Networks' Machine Identity platform. Own meaningful technical challenges: You'll have the autonomy to design, build, and evolve solutions that directly impact product quality and engineering velocity. Continue growing technically: Expand your expertise across distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, automation platforms, PKI, certificate lifecycle management, and developer tooling. #LI-HA1 #LI-Hybrid Qualifications 5+ years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, test automation, SDET, or related backend engineering roles with a strong focus on automation and quality. Strong software engineering skills in Python, Java, or Golang. Experience designing, building, and evolving automation frameworks for backend services and distributed systems. Strong understanding of Linux/Unix and Windows operating system fundamentals. Working knowledge of networking protocols (TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/S)