Senior Cloud Native Security Architect

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks®, we’re united by a shared mission—to protect our digital way of life. We thrive at the intersection of innovation and impact, solving real-world problems with cutting-edge technology and bold thinking. Here, everyone has a voice, and every idea counts. If you’re ready to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who are just as passionate as you are, you’re in the right place.

Who We Are

In order to be the cybersecurity partner of choice, we must trailblaze the path and shape the future of our industry. This is something our employees work at each day and is defined by our values: Disruption, Collaboration, Execution, Integrity, and Inclusion. We weave AI into the fabric of everything we do and use it to augment the impact every individual can have. If you are passionate about solving real-world problems and ideating beside the best and the brightest, we invite you to join us!

This role is remote, but distance is no barrier to impact. Our hybrid teams collaborate across geographies to solve big problems, stay close to our customers, and grow together. You will be part of a culture that values trust, accountability, and shared success where your work truly matters.

Job Summary

As a member of the Cloud Native Security Services team you’ll work directly with Idira (formerly CyberArk) customers to understand, plan, and implement complex product use cases across business critical environments.

Our team has a long history as Cloud and Kubernetes consultants, with our customers’ needs central to our success. Today we continue that work within Idira, bringing our industry expertise to help customers realise the value they need from our products, whilst informing future releases with direct insights from the field.

We are a remote first team with no current expectation to travel on a regular basis. We like to meet in-person as often as we can, with opportunities to come to the London office roughly once a month, and bigger team meet-ups planned a few times a year.

Currently we’re working with Idira Secrets Management, Workload Identity, and Agentic Security product teams; developing custom integrations and navigating complex deployment environments, whilst acting as the customers embedded product and domain subject matter experts.

Where others specialise in fast and efficient product enablement, we target the most complex customer environments and use cases, requiring both broad and deep industry and domain experience. We prefer to work directly with customer teams, collaborating with stakeholders across operations, security and engineering teams.

We care deeply about fostering a diverse team of individuals and encourage all to apply, even if you’re unsure of your qualifications or fit. We would love to hear from you and appreciate you taking the time to apply.

The Role

As a Senior Cloud Native Security Architect you will repeatedly face new and difficult challenges. Your ability to remain composed and collaborative, whilst you work with your team to find solutions will be the biggest determining factor in your success in the role. Perfect execution is never our target; instead we aim to leave the customer closer to their goals and further from ambiguity, all whilst providing an exceptional customer experience.

You will be expected to:

• Lead customer engagements incl. scoping work, directing other team members, acting as the primary point of contact for project stakeholders, running calls and workshops, and providing regular project updates.

• Pro-actively initiate and contribute to internal initiatives.

• Consistently apply (and confidently speak on) cloud security best practices

• Actively engage in team/group level strategy and goal setting activities.

• Act as a peer mentor to your fellow team members. incl. providing regular feedback for personal and professional development.

You will succeed in this role if you:

• Are comfortable working directly with customer stakeholders at all levels (i.e. senior management - individual contributors).

• Are able to effectively empathise with and translate between stakeholders across different domains (i.e. infosec, operations, product R&D, senior leadership).

• Enjoy working in complex (and often ambiguous) problem domains. Helping customers determine what they actually want and need, then designing and implementing pragmatic solutions to get them there.

• Show up to calls with empathy, patience, positivity, and the desire to collaborate towards shared goals.

• Easily move between different levels of abstraction (high level architecture and solution design -  implementation detail and configuration).

• Enjoy learning and can quickly become a subject matter expert in previously unfamiliar domains.

• Inspire confidence and restore calm in otherwise tense or strained situations (i.e. managing unhappy customer stakeholders and high impact service outages).

• Approach challenges pragmatically, preferring actions that produce meaningful customer value over polish and philosophical alignment.

Qualifications

The Tech

We work with an extremely broad range of tools and technologies, mostly cloud centric, and often open source (i.e. CNCF projects). As such, we often take on work in domains where we’re not yet experts, and instead must learn what’s needed in the moment, relying on a set of foundational best practices to guide us.

That said, there are a few technologies that come up time and time again for which hands-on experience and a good understanding proves extremely valuable. 

These are in approximate order of importance:

• Kubernetes - self-managed (Openshift, K3s, etc.) and cloud managed (GKE, Autopilot, EKS, etc.)

• Container runtimes (Docker / containerd / podman)

• SPIFFE / SPIRE (for workload identity)

• Linux / Unix operating systems (RHEL / Rocky Linux / Ubuntu / Debian)

• Cloud networking (VPCs, firewalls,network peering, VPNs)

• Cloud IAM (predominantly GCP and AWS)

• Cloud databases (Cloud SQL, Spanner, DynamoDB, Bigtable, etc.)

• Golang / Python (for gluing services and deployment scripting)

• Terraform / Crossplane / Config Connector (GCP) / CloudFormation (AWS) (for deploying and managing cloud infrastructure)

• Git (for source control)

• Github Actions / Jenkins (for CI)

• Argo CD / Flux (for CD)

• Vault / Conjur (for secrets management)

 

We don’t expect candidates to be experts in all of these, but a strong foundation of security best practices, and a working knowledge of Kubernetes and the major cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, etc.) will be essential. Experience with any of the others is a huge advantage.

Once again, we encourage you to apply if this work sounds at all interesting to you. We have the ability to offer positions at lower levels if we think the fit is good but your experience needs development. We have capacity in the team to mentor and would always prefer an enthusiastic candidate and a great team fit than lots of experience but a poor fit.

Thanks for taking the time to read through this spec and we look forward to hearing from you!

Our Commitment

We’re trailblazers that dream big, 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.

Is role eligible for Immigration Sponsorship? No. Please note that we will not sponsor applicants for work visas for this position.