Senior Staff Engineer Intern

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); experience with PKI, certificate management, or identity infrastructure is highly desirable.

• Hands-on experience with microservices architectures, distributed systems, and system integration testing.

• Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using GitLab CI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or similar technologies.

• Experience working in containerized environments using Docker and Kubernetes.

• Experience emulating complex enterprise customer environments.

• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code technologies such as Terraform and Ansible.

• Experience with performance testing tools such as JMeter, Gatling, or custom performance frameworks.

• Experience with public cloud platforms, with GCP preferred; AWS or Azure experience is also valuable.

• Experience building developer productivity tools, automation platforms, or internal engineering frameworks.

• Strong debugging and root cause analysis skills across application, infrastructure, networking, and cloud environments.

• Experience building robust, scalable automation frameworks and testing infrastructure.

• Experience managing Linux-based virtual machines and enterprise-scale test environments.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to quickly understand complex distributed systems.

• Demonstrated ability to lead technically challenging initiatives and influence engineering decisions across multiple teams through technical expertise and collaboration.

• Self-motivated, able to work independently, prioritize effectively, and thrive in a fast-paced engineering environment.

• Ability to write clean, maintainable, well-documented code following engineering best practices.

• Work in hybrid capacity 3 days a week at our Santa Clara, CA office.

Preferred

• Experience testing cybersecurity products or enterprise security platforms.

• Experience with SaaS products and large-scale cloud-native architectures.

• Experience with PKI, certificate authorities, certificate lifecycle management, machine identity, or identity management systems.

• Experience working with enterprise IT infrastructure, including load balancers, web servers, certificate authorities, identity management systems, and related technologies.

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.

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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? No. Please note that we will not sponsor applicants for work visas for this position.