Principal Architect, Enterprise AI (Distinguish IT SWE)
- Santa Clara, CA
- Permanent
- Full-time
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 AreWe 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 DescriptionYour CareerAs a Distinguished Architect for Enterprise AI Platform, you will be driving the design, implementation, scaling, and evangelism of the end-to-end platform that will be used across IT and Enterprise business functions (Sales, Marketing, Finance, HR, Legal, etc).Distinguished Enterprise Architect to lead our transformation toward AI-first development practices while optimizing developer productivity and modernizing our enterprise application landscape.We are looking for a visionary leader who will architect and drive the implementation of cutting-edge developer productivity solutions and a modern enterprise applications landscape with AI at the core. This role bridges the gap between emerging AI technologies and practical enterprise needs while establishing architectural standards that accelerate delivery velocity across the organization.The Distinguished Architect will ensure that all transformation efforts are strategically aligned, scalable, reusable, and sustainable.This role directly impacts the organization's ability to innovate faster, reduce time-to-market, and maintain engineering excellence while scaling AI capabilities across all business functions.Your Impact
- Vision & Design: Define and evangelize enterprise-wide architectural vision for engineering excellence, developer productivity platforms, and AI-integrated applications.
- Engg Excellence: Establish architectural principles, design patterns, and engineering standards that prioritize quality, reliability, maintainability, and AI-first approaches.Drive technical strategy for internal developer platforms (IDPs), code quality frameworks, development toolchains, reducing tech debt and improving delivery velocity. Design and implement comprehensive code quality frameworks including automated testing, static analysis, and security scanning. Architect self-service capabilities, automated testing frameworks, and deployment pipelines with built-in quality gates.
- Technology & Platforms: Champion platform engineering practices, infrastructure-as-code methodologies, and shift-left quality approaches.Drive selection of AI tools, frameworks, cloud solutions, and hybrid infrastructure that align with business and engineering needs.
- Governance: Establish metrics and observability systems to measure and continuously improve both developer productivity, code quality and improve security posture. Promote adoption of a consistent technology stack reducing complexity. Lead the integration of AI/ML capabilities into enterprise applications and development workflows.
- Cross functional leadership: Collaborate with engineering leadership to align architectural decisions with business objectives and quality standards. Foster a culture of continuous learning, technical excellence, and engineering craftsmanship.
- Innovation Leadership: Actively learn and incorporate advances in AI, GenAI, LLMs, AIOps, and scalable architectures. Bring emerging innovations into production through POCs, hackathons, and controlled experimentation.
- 15+ years in software engineering, distributed systems, or enterprise architecture, including 7+ years leading enterprise and application architecture at scale.
- Proven expertise in designing complex, enterprise-grade platforms (custom applications and SaaS solutions), ideally across multiple domains (e.g., customer support, finance, sales)
- Experience with application modernization, cloud native architecture, API first design principles, integration strategies, event driven architecture, disaster recovery, and application security patterns.
- Deep knowledge of AI innovations and practical understanding of the full AI lifecycle for developer experience, building agents, apps.
- Extensive experience with distributed systems architecture, microservices, multi cloud, hybrid cloud, Integration platforms, data platforms, and data lakes.
- Strong communication skills with a track record of influencing across VP+ and cross-org stakeholders.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
- Must be located in SF Bay area