Palo Alto Networks · 1 day ago
Distinguished Architect, Engineering Excellence
Santa Clara, CA
Full-time
Onsite
Lead/Staff
$243K/yr - $335K/yr
12+ years expPalo Alto Networks is dedicated to protecting the digital way of life and is seeking a Distinguished Architect to lead their enterprise-wide transformation towards an AI-native engineering culture. This role involves architecting shifts from legacy systems to innovative solutions while driving excellence in software delivery across the organization.
Agentic AICloud SecurityCyber SecurityNetwork SecuritySecurity
Responsibilities
Driving Strategy: The "Crawl, Walk, Run" Framework
Define the Vision: Move the organization from simple individual augmentation (e.g., GitHub Copilot) to systemic autonomy (Agentic workflows)
Governance & Safety: Establish "Human-on-the-Loop" protocols. You will define the liability frameworks and "circuit breakers" necessary to prevent AI agents from spiraling into infinite loops or security breaches
Tooling Landscape: Curate the corporate toolkit, making high-stakes decisions between enterprise platforms and high-velocity disruptors based on privacy and capability
Brownfield Modernization: Sales, Finance, Legal & Support
Legacy Analysis: Utilize AI agents to reverse-engineer and document our core business systems across the enterprise. You will implement tools to create "interactive documentation" that explains complex logic in Sales, Finance, Legal, and Customer Support workflows where original authors are no longer present
Reimagine process at Scale: Lead initiatives to automate technical debt reduction, using AI to upgrade language versions and refactor synchronous code to asynchronous patterns without disrupting critical GTM, contract processing, or support ticket resolution flows
Greenfield Acceleration: The "Blank Page" Solution
Automated Architecture: Implement "Diagram-as-Code" workflows where architecture diagrams are generated from natural language and stay synced with the code
Rapid Prototyping: Empower product teams to move from "Text-to-UI" instantaneously, using generative design tools to validate ideas before a single line of production code is written
Evangelism & Culture Transformation
Change Management: Drive the cultural shift required for AI adoption. You will host hackathons, internal "prompt engineering" workshops, and town halls to demystify AI for the broader organization
Cross-Functional Bridge: Act as the translator between Engineering and Business functions (Marketing, Legal, HR). You will demonstrate how AI in the SDLC directly impacts time-to-market for their specific requirements
Qualification
Required
Bachelor's degree with 15 years of relevant experience, or Master's degree with 12 years of relevant experience, or PhD with 8 years of relevant experience
A minimum of 7 years of direct experience in an enterprise architecture role
Demonstrated hands-on coding proficiency and deep expertise with modern AI coding assistants and codebase-aware tools
Proven track record of architecting and modifying complex enterprise business applications (e.g., ERP, CRM, HRIS, CLM)
Experience leading a major technological and cultural shift within a large-scale engineering organization
Preferred
Deep understanding of Microservices, Event-Driven Architecture, and API-first design principles
Familiarity with modern AIOps, observability platforms, and causal AI for root cause analysis
Knowledge of self-healing test automation frameworks and advanced shift-left QA methodologies
Experience explaining complex technical strategies and their business ROI to non-technical stakeholders and executive leadership
Benefits
Restricted stock units
Bonus
Company
Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks is a cybersecurity company that offers cybersecurity solutions for organizations.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
Palo Alto Networks has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (579)
2024 (482)
2023 (341)
2022 (452)
2021 (493)
2020 (235)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$65MKey Investors
Icon VenturesLehman HoldingsGlobespan Capital Partners
2012-07-20IPO
2008-11-03Series C· $10M
2008-08-18Series C· $27M
Leadership Team
Helmut Reisinger
CEO EMEA
Nikesh Arora
Chairman CEO
Recent News
2026-01-22
The Motley Fool
2026-01-22
Company data provided by crunchbase