Staff Advanced Solutions E-TAC Engineer, NGFW

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.

Your Career

The Engineering TAC (ETAC) Advanced Solutions team is an exciting crossroads between Technical Assistance Center (TAC) and Engineering. This team is uniquely empowered to drive decisions and to be the thought leaders within the Global Customer Support organization at Palo Alto Networks. We are a relatively small, global team consisting of top performers with support, engineering and development backgrounds. Our roles are very hands-on and have a high impact on the company.  The Advanced Solutions team role also includes building/architecting robust environments to assist with complex issue reproduction/resolution, as well as large-scale, cross-platform lab buildouts for feature testing, software release, etc… 

Our Team consists of Engineers who are experienced in Network Engineering, NetSec, QA, Software Development/DevOps, Cloud, as well as SME’s in areas for bleeding edge tools such as Ixia/Keysight, Spirent, etc… Team's Mission includes Application and Tools Development, AI/Machine Learning R&D, DB Systems Administration, Release Management, and Data Analytics. You will network and collaborate with key stakeholders within Global Support, Engineering, QA, PM, Sales, and more, leveraging your capability of detailing difficult technical issues to both non-technical and technical professionals. 
 

Your Impact

• An ETAC engineer has the highest level of expertise amongst support teams, and is responsible for staying up to date with technical details on Palo Alto Networks new products and industry in general 
• Work with TAC to provide expert-level technical support of customer issues that involve very complex network topologies, architectures, and security designs
• Lead technical discussions with cross-functional teams, fostering an environment of transparency that ultimately leads to better products. Develop advanced troubleshooting focused tools and scripts to help solve complex customer issues and improve product supportability
• Help drive and enable ML/AI related projects
• Own critical and executive level issues partnering primarily with Customer Support and Engineering to provide expertise in identifying and resolving customer issues, which entails working with the TAC case owner and Engineering on a replication or verification and communicating updates
• Lead in Identifying problems and taking actions to fix them across support and product life cycles 
• Develop and deliver expert level training materials for TAC support, Engineering, and Professional Services teams
• Ownership of Release Management:

  • Assist with managing the end-to-end release process, including coordinating with various teams to gather release requirements and dependencies.

    • Responsible for scheduling, planning, and controlling the software delivery process for on-prem and cloud products (CSP/Adminsite/AWS/Azure/OCI/GCP)

• Coordinate with IT/Dev/QA to assure IT requirements are met for a seamless release process
• SW release after completing testing/deployment stage
• Define strategic usage of release management tools (Autoex/Jenkins/Automation Staging Scripts)
• Collaborate on product development with cross-functional teams including Engineering/QA/PM
• Triage Production issues impacting customer deliverables on Palo Alto Networks Support Portal

Your Experience

• Minimum of 9 years of professional experience
• Technical Support or Development experience supporting enterprise customers with very complex LAN/WAN environments
• Deep understanding of TCP/IP and advanced knowledge of LAN/WAN technologies, expertise with general routing/switching, Routing protocols (e.g. BGP, OSPF, Multicast), branch and DataCenter Architectures
• Expertise with Remote Access VPN solutions, IPSEC, PKI & SSL
• Expertise with Cloud services and Infrastructure a plus
• Familiarity with C, Python, or at least one scripting language - While this is not a role to be a developer, one should have some experience in automating moderately complex tasks
• Experience with Palo Alto Networks products is highly desired
• Understand how data packets get processed - Devices shouldn’t be a “black box”, one should have an understanding of packet processing at various stages and how that can result in different symptoms/outcomes
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to deliver highly technical informative presentations - While you will not be involved with taking call from a queue, there may be cases where your expertise is called upon to speak with customers from time to time, along with Support members,  Developers, Sales Engineers and the rest of your team
• Proficiency in creating technical documentation using applications such as Powerpoint/Google Slides or knowledge-base/intranet platforms such as Lumapps, Jive or Confluence
• Familiar with automation with Jenkins, Terraform, etc
• Understanding of Linux operating systems.  Able to operate headless Linux systems and Shell scripting
• Basic knowledge of deploying and configuring web servers, i.e Nginx, Apache, IIS.
• Understanding of load balancing technologies and HTTP forwarding with Nginx, HaProxy, and load balancers provided by AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud
• Familiarity with virtualization technologies including VMware, KVM, OpenStack, AWS, Google Cloud and Azure
• Familiarity with Docker.  Able to create, manage, and deploy docker images on Docker server.  Manage running containers.  Create docker-compose YAML files
• Familiar with front-end technologies including JavaScript, React, HTML, and CSS for building responsive, user-friendly interfaces
• Experienced in back-end development using frameworks such as Python and Flask
• Brings a creative and hands-on approach to testing and enhancing small applications, participating in all aspects of the testing lifecycle—from functional and performance testing to idea generation and continuous monitoring—with a focus on improvement and efficacy to ensure optimal quality and user satisfaction
• Willing to work flexible times including occasional weekends and evenings

The Team

Our technical support team is critical to our success and mission. As part of this team, you enable customer success by providing support to clients after they have purchased our products. Our dedication to our customers doesn’t stop once they sign – it evolves. As threats and technology change, we stay in step to accomplish our mission.

You’ll be involved in implementing new products, transitioning from old products to new, and will fix integrations and critical issues as they are raised – in fact, you’ll seek them out to ensure our clients are safely supported. We fix and identify technical problems, with a pointed focus of providing the best customer support in the industry.

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.

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.