Principal Technical Support Engineer

In this Principal Technical Support role, you operate as the senior technical authority within customer support for a defined product specialization. You set technical standards, lead systemic improvements, and work through highly complex issues with a selective case workload.

Responsibilities

• Maintain deep expertise in product architecture and deployments to establish cross-team investigation standards and surface emerging risks.
• Act as the technical authority for complex engagements and New Product Introductions (NPI), using advanced diagnostics such as packet and log analysis and lab reproductions.
• Lead investigation and mitigation strategies while supporting assigned engineers, ensuring they retain ownership of the case and customer coordination.
• Share findings, risks, and recommendations clearly with technical teams, senior leadership, and customers.
• Own the technical quality of defect submissions, ensuring JIRAs include actionable evidence, and collaborate with Engineering and PM to prioritize fixes based on business risk.
• Improve product serviceability by identifying gaps in diagnostics, tooling, and documentation, partnering with Engineering to implement and validate changes.
• Drive and influence product KPIs, including time to resolution, time to engineering engagement, defect quality, playbook usage, and Copilot adoption.
• Mentor engineers across all levels by converting complex investigations into advanced training, technical workshops, and reusable troubleshooting guidance.
• Facilitate evidence-based, blameless postmortems for significant incidents and drive corrective actions to completion.
• Proactively lead cross-functional projects to improve support processes, aligning stakeholders and turning incident learnings into long-term organizational improvements.
• Provide support that includes mandatory weekend and holiday shift work and on-call support, using a mix of as-needed and rotational coverage that may change.

Requirements

• 10-15+ years of relevant experience in enterprise networking, security, or support, plus a Bachelor’s degree in a technical field, or equivalent practical or military experience.
• Deep product specialization across architecture, complex deployments, advanced troubleshooting, and failure analysis.
• Advanced, hands-on diagnostic ability to resolve ambiguous problems, with strong judgment for evaluating customer impact and technical risk.
• Proven experience influencing Engineering, PM, and Support to drive technical initiatives and establish standards without reporting authority.
• Experience improving defect submission quality, product serviceability, and diagnostic practices across teams.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, facilitate postmortems, and lead process improvements from identification through validation.
• Clear communication skills for audiences ranging from hands-on engineers to customer executives.
• Advanced certifications such as Palo Alto Networks Certified Network Security Architect, CCIE, or equivalent expert-level networking/security certifications.
• Must be aligned with Palo Alto Networks product certifications, or demonstrate equivalent technical expertise that is actively considered.

Technologies

• Packet/log analysis
• Lab reproductions
• JIRAs
• Copilot

Location

Dallas, TX (onsite)

Compensation

The compensation for this position depends on qualifications, experience, and work location. For candidates who receive an offer at the posted level, the expected annual range for non-sales roles is:

• $134,600.00 - $217,800.00/yr

The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus.

Immigration Sponsorship

No. Palo Alto Networks will not sponsor applicants for work visas for this position.

Company Commitment

• Reasonable accommodations are available for qualified individuals with a disability. For assistance, contact [email protected].
• Palo Alto Networks is an equal opportunity employer.