Full-Time
Senior Manager
Performance Engineering, Cortex
Posted on 10/31/2025
Palo Alto Networks
10,001+ employees
Firewall and cloud security provider
No salary listed
Company Historically Provides H1B Sponsorship
Santa Clara, CA, USA
In Person
 QA & Testing (3) |
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- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
- 10+ years of experience in software engineering or quality engineering, with at least 5 years in performance engineering.
- 5+ years of experience managing and scaling high-performing engineering teams.
- Strong expertise in distributed systems, microservices, cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), and container technologies (Kubernetes, Docker).
- Proficiency in performance tools and frameworks (e.g., JMeter, Gatling, Locust, k6, LoadRunner, custom frameworks).
- Deep understanding of system profiling, database tuning, caching, and network optimization.
- Strong communication, leadership, and stakeholder management skills.
- Experience introducing innovative approaches (e.g., ML/AI-driven performance analysis, chaos engineering).
- Define and execute the performance engineering strategy across products, platforms, and services.
- Establish key performance metrics, SLAs, and success criteria aligned with customer and business needs.
- Build and scale a global team of performance engineers, fostering innovation, accountability, and excellence.
- Oversee the design and development of performance test frameworks, automation tools, and simulation environments for end-to-end system testing.
- Drive benchmarking and profiling of distributed systems under realistic load and stress scenarios.
- Collaborate with engineering and architecture teams to identify bottlenecks and provide tuning recommendations for backend, frontend, APIs, databases, and infrastructure.
- Ensure performance engineering is integrated early in the SDLC (“shift-left” approach).
- Partner with product management and architects to define scalability goals and capacity models.
- Work with DevOps/SRE to ensure production readiness, observability, and monitoring align with performance standards.
- Provide leadership in incident investigations involving performance and scalability issues in production.
- Champion performance best practices, methodologies, and metrics across the organization.
- Introduce AI-driven performance insights, predictive modeling, and automated anomaly detection.
- Continuously evaluate emerging tools, technologies, and practices to evolve the performance engineering strategy.
Palo Alto Networks provides hardware, software, and subscription-based security solutions to protect organizations from cyber threats. Its products include network firewalls (Strata), cloud security (Prisma Cloud), and AI-powered security operations (Cortex), which work together to secure on-premises and cloud environments, manage identity and access, and detect threats. The company differentiates itself by offering an integrated, end-to-end security stack that combines hardware, software licenses, and ongoing services across enterprises, SMBs, and government clients. Its goal is to deliver comprehensive protection for networks, data, and applications as organizations move between data centers and cloud environments.
Company Size
10,001+
Company Stage
IPO
Headquarters
Santa Clara, California
Founded
2015
Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Platformization drives larger multi-product deals and stickier customers.
- Next-generation security ARR is growing faster than total revenue.
- AI-security demand expands as enterprises deploy autonomous agents.
What critics are saying
- CrowdStrike and Fortinet intensify platform competition and compress win rates.
- Firewall revenue still anchors the business, exposing core category slowdown.
- A Prisma AIRS miss would damage Palo Alto's AI-security credibility.
What makes Palo Alto Networks unique
- Unified platform spans network, cloud, and security operations.
- Idira secures human, machine, and agentic identities.
- Prisma AIRS targets AI-agent tool calls, not just prompts.
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Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
↓ -6%1 year growth
↓ -6%2 year growth
↓ -6%Wall Street strategists are viewing recent tech stock volatility as a buying opportunity following a two-week Iran ceasefire. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF has fallen 12% over the past month, despite the S&P 500 rising slightly. Ben Emons of FedWatch noted "a bit of an overreaction", whilst Mark Gibbens of Gibbens Capital said it's "time to jump in". Strategists highlighted opportunities in Palantir Technologies, Palo Alto Networks, and Oracle, despite recent share price declines. Nvidia has dropped from recent highs to trade at 21 times forward earnings. Tiffany McGhee of Pivotal Advisors praised Oracle's cash flow and enterprise contracts, whilst Gradient Investments' Keith Gangl called Palo Alto a rare opportunity to buy quality "on sale". Strategists cautioned that volatility remains, but emphasised AI as a powerful catalyst.
Palo Alto Networks has received a Buy initiation from Benchmark with a $200 price target, based on the company's trajectory towards achieving Rule of 60 profitability status in FY2026 through 22–23% revenue growth and 37% adjusted free cash flow margin. The cybersecurity firm reported Q2 FY2026 revenue of $2.594 billion, beating estimates, with non-GAAP EPS of $1.03 surpassing the 93 cent estimate. Next-Generation Security ARR reached $6.30 billion, up 33% year-over-year. Despite the stock trading down 10.33% year-to-date and below its 200-day moving average, 44 analysts rate it Buy or Strong Buy with a consensus target of $206.97. However, investors should consider the elevated 42x forward P/E valuation and integration risks from pending acquisitions.
Morgan Stanley identified five top cybersecurity stocks after attending the RSA Conference 2026: Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, SailPoint and SentinelOne. The firm believes these companies are well-positioned to benefit from growing AI security demand as businesses deploy AI agents. Microsoft has 1.6 million security customers and a $20 billion revenue run rate, with analyst Keith Weiss setting a $650 price target, implying 80% upside. Analyst Meta Marshall gave Palo Alto Networks a $223 target (50% upside), noting its broad AI portfolio and advantageous position despite a 20% year-to-date decline. CrowdStrike received a $510 target (38% upside) and was upgraded to a top pick based on its strong endpoint franchise and AI-driven security capabilities.
Palo Alto Networks shares rose 5% on Monday to close at $154.35 following news that CEO Nikesh Arora purchased an additional stake worth $10 million in the company. According to a regulatory filing, Arora acquired 68,085 shares on 27 March at prices ranging from $146.87 to $147.48. The cybersecurity firm also unveiled Prisma AIRS 3.0, a new security platform designed to protect the entire agentic AI lifecycle. The product addresses security challenges in AI-powered enterprises by discovering AI agents across cloud environments, assessing risks continuously and providing real-time protection at scale. Palo Alto Networks said the platform enables enterprises to move beyond simply monitoring AI interactions to safely authorising autonomous execution, closing visibility gaps in AI operations.
Palo Alto Networks has received a buy rating from Freedom Capital Markets, which reduced its price target from $230 to $210 whilst maintaining its recommendation. The cybersecurity firm reported strong second-quarter fiscal 2026 results, with earnings of $1.03 per share beating estimates of $0.94, and revenue of $2.6 billion exceeding expectations of $2.58 billion. Freedom Capital attributed the performance to growing demand for cybersecurity platform integration and successful acquisitions of CyberArk and Chronosphere. The company's third-quarter forecast also surpassed expectations, driven by merger and acquisition activity. The analyst raised revenue forecasts but lowered diluted non-GAAP earnings per share estimates, citing the transitional period of merger integration. Palo Alto Networks provides cybersecurity solutions including firewalls, malware protection and cloud security.