Senior Manager, Performance Engineering- Cortex

Company Description

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks® everything starts and ends with our mission:

Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.

Our vision is a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. We are a company built on the foundation of challenging and disrupting the way things are done, and we’re looking for innovators who are as committed to shaping the future of cybersecurity as we are.

Who We Are

We take our mission of protecting the digital way of life seriously. We are relentless in protecting our customers and we believe that the unique ideas of every member of our team contributes to our collective success. Our values were crowdsourced by employees and are brought to life through each of us everyday - from disruptive innovation and collaboration, to execution. From showing up for each other with integrity to creating an environment where we all feel included.

As a member of our team, you will be shaping the future of cybersecurity. We work fast, value ongoing learning, and we respect each employee as a unique individual. Knowing we all have different needs, our development and personal wellbeing programs are designed to give you choice in how you are supported. This includes our FLEXBenefits wellbeing spending account with over 1,000 eligible items selected by employees, our mental and financial health resources, and our personalized learning opportunities - just to name a few!

At Palo Alto Networks, we believe in the power of collaboration and value in-person interactions. This is why our employees generally work full time from our office with flexibility offered where needed. This setup fosters casual conversations, problem-solving, and trusted relationships. Our goal is to create an environment where we all win with precision.

Job Description

Your Career

We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Senior Manager, Performance Engineering to lead our global performance engineering organization. This role will drive strategy, execution, and innovation in performance testing, benchmarking, capacity planning, and system optimization for large-scale, distributed cloud platforms. The successful candidate will build and lead a high-performing team that partners with engineering, product, DevOps, and architecture groups to ensure our products meet and exceed customer expectations for speed, scalability, resiliency, and efficiency.

Responsibilities

• Leadership & Strategy

• 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.

• Engineering & Execution

• 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).

• Cross-Functional Collaboration

• 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.

• Innovation & Continuous Improvement

• 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.

Qualifications

Your Experience

• 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).

Why Join Us

• Opportunity to lead a critical function that impacts customer experience and business growth.
• Work on cutting-edge cloud-scale challenges with a talented global team.
• Drive innovation in performance engineering, automation, and AI-driven insights.
• Collaborate with leaders across engineering, product, and operations to shape the future of our platform.

Additional Information

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/commissioned roles) is expected to be between $185000 - $275000. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found here.

Our Commitment

We’re problem solvers that 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 accommodations@paloaltonetworks.com.

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.