Principal Software Escalation Engineer

• We’re looking for a Principal Escalation Engineer to serve as a key architect of customer stability and product maturity within the Jupiter Group
• This is a high-impact, cross-functional leadership role that sits at the intersection of R&D, Product, and Customer Success
• You will not just resolve issues, you will fundamentally shape how our products are designed, built, and delivered
• You will act as the “Voice of the Customer” within the engineering lifecycle, influencing architectural decisions to ensure our solutions are not only robust but also intuitive to deploy and manage
• By treating supportability and onboarding as core product features, you will protect R&D capacity, accelerate delivery, and ensure our innovations succeed in the real world
• Voice of the Customer in Design (Shift Left): Join discovery and design sessions to validate proposed features against real-world customer use cases. You will provide critical feedback on design and UX before development begins, flagging if a feature will be difficult to implement, fails to address specific edge cases, or introduces friction that hinders adoption
• Define Holistic Product & Supportability Requirements: Go beyond standard logging; define the capabilities needed to streamline the entire customer journey. This includes specifying requirements for smoother product onboarding, self-service troubleshooting tools, and connectivity checks (e.g., demanding a prerequisite script for connector installation or built-in latency monitoring between components)
• Own the R&D Escalation Strategy: Act as the single accountable authority for technical escalations, replacing reactive “ping-pong” with a structured, predictive pipeline that restores delivery predictability to the sprint teams
• Drive Operational Excellence: Transform how we monitor and maintain health by owning the logic behind PagerDuty alerts, reducing noise, and defining the “Definition of Ready” for operational handoffs
• Empower the Support Organization: Act as a force multiplier by leading high-level training and knowledge transfer, enabling Support to resolve complex issues independently and lowering the escalation rate
• Lead Incident Lifecycle & CAPA: Drive the post-incident process, ensuring that every failure results in a systemic improvement, whether it’s a code fix, a documentation update, or a process change
• Influence the Roadmap: Use data from the field (trends, escaped bugs, and friction points) to drive strategic roadmap decisions, ensuring we prioritize technical debt and usability improvements alongside new features

Benefits

• Healthcare: We value your health and provide options so you can choose what best supports your lifestyle and personal health goals. Various nationwide plans — including Blue Shield of California, Kaiser Permanente, Delta Dental, VSP, and more — are available to you and your family. Our providers offer the flexibility you want and the coverage you need
• Wellness: With a large on-site gym and daily, instructor-led exercise classes at HQ in Santa Clara, Palo Alto Networks actively supports employee fitness. Our juice bar, Gym & Juice, features fresh juice blends, a quick and nutritious option pre- or post-workout. And our ongoing wellness speaker series highlights the latest trends in health and wellness
• Development: Professional development is serious business at Palo Alto Networks, where the Talent Development team offers 25+ courses to help employees boost their careers and develop leadership capability
• Financial: Most roles are eligible for equity grants, and we now offer new hires a quarterly vesting schedule right away. We want you to be fairly compensated and rewarded as soon as you make an impact – on our team, that happens immediately! And because we consider every employee a stakeholder in our long-term success, we offer an Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) with a 24-month lookback. From life insurance to health savings accounts, we provide ways to help you protect and grow your wealth. Palo Alto Networks offers both traditional and Roth 401(k) options, along with a company match of 50% to a max annual amount of $1,000
• Time Off: In addition to paid corporate holidays, Flexible Time Off programs empower our employees to balance their work schedules with personal time off. We offer 12 weeks of full pay for medical leave and 6 weeks of full pay for parental leave. As a company with strong ties to the military and veterans, we also offer 26 weeks of full pay for military leave
• Perks: Our corporate discount program provides employees with significant discounts on merchandise, travel and entertainment. We offer many on-site perks at headquarters, including cafeterias, fuel service, dry cleaning service, EV charging stations, and a company store. We also provide complimentary drinks, fresh fruit, and snacks in break rooms across our campus to help everyone power through the day.

Life at Palo Alto Network

• 8+ years of experience in the software industry (Technical Support, R&D, or Sustaining Engineering)
• Exceptional communication and leadership skills: You can challenge a Product Manager on a use case or guide a developer on a logging standard with equal confidence
• Strong technical depth (scripting in Python/Bash/Go, reading code, SQL) to investigate issues independently and build tooling
• Proven ability to drive cross-team initiatives and influence stakeholders without direct authority
• 5+ years of hands-on experience troubleshooting complex SaaS/Cloud environments (AWS preferred)
• A “Product-Engineering” Mindset: You can look at a technical design and immediately foresee how a customer will struggle with it. You care deeply about the user experience, not just the code execution
• Highly self-motivated with a strong sense of ownership and accountability
• Experience defining “Definition of Ready” processes for escalation handling
• Experience defining architectural standards for observability and deployability
• Background in Customer Success Engineering or Solutions Engineering
• Experience in the Cyber Security domain