Principal Machine Learning Engineer

Overview

Sr Staff-level role within the IT Automation & AI Engineering team, setting technical direction and architectural standards for AI-first enterprise applications and automation platforms.

What you'll do

• Set architectural vision and technical direction for AI-first enterprise applications and platforms spanning multiple teams and business domains
• Lead the architecture and delivery of the most complex cross-team systems across full-stack applications, cloud-native services, enterprise data, and applied AI
• Establish reusable engineering standards, reference architectures, and shared capabilities for AI-first systems, including agentic workflows, RAG and retrieval, LLM evaluation, guardrails and AI security, and tool integration using technologies such as Vertex AI, LangChain/LangGraph, MCP, and A2A protocols
• Partner with senior business and technology leaders to translate ambiguous, high-impact problems into clear technical strategies and influence broader technical direction
• Drive AI-native engineering practices and modern development workflows, including effective use of tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, and similar platforms to improve engineering velocity and quality
• Mentor senior engineers and technical leaders, raise engineering standards, and multiply technical impact across the broader organization

What you'll need

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 10+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrated technical leadership across complex, production-scale systems
• Deep full-stack and distributed systems engineering experience
• Demonstrated experience setting architecture and technical direction across multiple services, applications, or engineering teams
• Production experience designing and building AI-integrated systems using LLMs, RAG, embeddings, tool/function calling, agentic workflows, or related architectures
• Experience designing production AI systems involving LLM orchestration, agents, retrieval, tool use, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop workflows
• Strong understanding of AI evaluation, guardrails, model and agent reliability, security, latency, cost, and production observability
• Strong understanding of APIs, enterprise data, system integration, cloud-native architecture, security, reliability, and production operations
• Experience deploying and scaling cloud-native applications and services
• Proven ability to translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical architectures and execution strategies
• Demonstrated ability to influence senior engineers, cross-functional stakeholders, and technical leadership
• Track record of establishing technical standards and multiplying impact beyond individual project ownership

Nice to have

• Experience with TypeScript, Node.js/NestJS, React, Python, and SQL
• Experience with RAG architectures, vector databases, embeddings, semantic search, retrieval, and context engineering
• Experience with LangChain/LangGraph, MCP, A2A protocols, tool integration, and production agentic architectures
• Experience establishing evaluation frameworks, LLM security controls, prompt injection defenses, and input/output validation
• Experience with applied machine learning or data science, including model development and evaluation, experimentation, statistical analysis, forecasting, classification, or other predictive techniques
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, event-driven systems, and modern cloud infrastructure
• Experience using AI-native development environments such as Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, or similar tools in professional engineering workflows
• Experience building reusable enterprise platforms, reference architectures, or shared technical capabilities adopted across multiple teams

Details

• Location: Bangalore, India (Bagmane Tech Park office)
• Most teams work from the office full time, with flexibility when needed
• Palo Alto Networks will not sponsor applicants for work visas for this position