Sr. Forward Deployed Engineer (Customer Engineering, Prisma AIRS)

Job description

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

As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) for Prisma AIRS, you are a hands-on developer and systems architect who embeds with customer engineering teams. You write production code, design low-latency topologies, and build custom plugins to ship secure enterprise AI workloads to production. You bridge the gap between customer production environments and core engineering, extending the platform edge while directly contributing code back to the core Prisma AIRS engine.

Key Responsibilities

Write production-grade code (Python, Go, TypeScript) to integrate Prisma AIRS with microservices, API meshes, and multi-cloud architectures. Build custom middleware/plugins for identity-aware policies, prompt security, dynamic routing, and telemetry pipelines. Develop automated deployment modules (Terraform, Helm, Kubernetes) and SDK wrappers. Optimize high-throughput, low-latency traffic paths including streaming payloads, caching, and load balancing.

Lead Architectural Design Reviews (ADRs) with customer Principal Engineers and CISOs for zero-trust deployments. Deploy hybrid, multi-cloud, or VPC-isolated gateway topologies across multi-LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, local vLLM). Serve as the tier-3 engineering point of contact for live production systems, debugging distributed systems bottlenecks. Analyze OpenTelemetry/Prometheus traces to diagnose edge-case failures in AI agent frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, and AutoGen.

Upstream custom plugins, bug fixes, and edge integrations directly into core product repositories. Partner with Product and Core SWE to turn enterprise architectural patterns into platform features. Convert customer implementations into reusable reference architectures, deployment patterns, and automation frameworks. Identify feature gaps, usability improvements, and operational pain points to influence the product roadmap.

Required Qualifications

Education & Experience: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience), or 7+ years of professional software engineering experience writing production-grade code.

Core Software & API Development

Expertise in Python (preferred), Go, TypeScript, or C++, with deep experience developing, debugging, and integrating enterprise APIs (REST, gRPC, WebSockets) and API gateways (e.g., Envoy, Kong).

AI & LLM Architecture

Hands-on experience with LLM orchestration, prompt security, token optimization, model routing, and vector databases / RAG architectures.

Infrastructure & Cloud Native

Proficiency with containerization, orchestration, and infrastructure-as-code (Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform) across major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

Security & Networking

Solid understanding of enterprise security protocols including OIDC/OAuth2, zero-trust networking, and secure API integration.

Testing & Quality Assurance

Experience using testing frameworks (e.g., PyTest, unittest) and robust evaluation workflows for distributed systems.

Customer & Strategic Impact

Proven ability to interface directly with executive leadership (CIOs/CISOs) and IT decision-makers—whiteboarding enterprise architectures, translating complex customer needs, and directly influencing product roadmaps.

Engineering Mindset

A hands-on "0-to-1" builder mentality who thrives in ambiguous environments, owns problems end-to-end, and enjoys pair-programming or digging into raw code and traces to solve live outages.

Preferred Qualifications

AI Evaluation & Frameworks: Familiarity with LLM evaluation frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, OpenAI Evals) and model performance/benchmarking metrics.

AI Safety & Adversarial Testing

Practical knowledge of AI security guardrails, bias detection, prompt injection defense, and adversarial testing practices.

Observability & Monitoring

Hands-on experience with enterprise observability, tracing, and log-monitoring systems (e.g., Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus).

Simulation & Synthetic Data

Exposure to synthetic data generation, automated data pipelines, and test simulation environments. 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 . $156,400.00 - $253,000.00/yr 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 [email protected] . 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