Distinguished Architect, Engineering Excellence

The Information Technology (IT) team at Palo Alto Networks is at the forefront of securing our own enterprise. We are a team of builders and innovators, responsible for the architecture, implementation, and maintenance of the systems and infrastructure that power our global operations. From network security to cloud applications, we ensure that our own employees have the secure, reliable, and cutting-edge tools they need to protect our digital way of life. Joining our IT team means you'll be a critical part of our 'customer zero' story, using and securing our own products to solve complex challenges., As a visionary Distinguished Architect, you will lead our enterprise-wide transformation from an "AI-Assisted" to an "AI-Native" engineering culture. Your mandate is to architect this shift, bridging our critical legacy systems with greenfield innovations. You will drive excellence by implementing a strategy that elevates developers to orchestrators of AI agents, ensuring the delivery of reliable, secure, and valuable software across the entire organization.

Who You Are

• A Player-Coach: You are as comfortable refactoring a 10-year-old monolith in the Finance stack as you are prototyping with the latest Agentic workflows in Cursor.
• A Master Communicator: You can explain the "Cone of Uncertainty" to a Junior Developer and the ROI of "Self-Healing Tests" to the CFO. You excel at evangelizing complex technical shifts to non-technical stakeholders across Marketing, Legal, and Customer Success.
• A Legacy Modernization Specialist: You approach "Brownfield" challenges with an operational mindset. You view legacy code not as a burden, but as a critical asset to be optimized. You use modern AI tools to systematically reverse-engineer, document, and stabilize hidden business logic to ensure operational continuity.

Your Impact

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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., Neep Help? Have questions or want to provide feedback? Please fill out this form and we will get in touch with you as soon as possible. Thanks! Subject Your Email Message Captcha

• 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 Qualifications

• 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.

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.

$243,000.00 - $335,000.00/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.