Why I joined Palo Alto Networks.. and you should too!

TL;DR An opportunity to be part of an amazing team that is building exabyte scale cloud platforms to keep enterprises (and in some ways our very existence in this digital age) safe, secure and trustworthy!

The Mission

A recent survey of US CEOs found that their number one concern was not a recession, or an increasingly competitive landscape... it was cybersecurity; and their ability to secure their enterprises in this increasingly digital age.

This is where Palo Alto Networks comes in. As the world's leading cybersecurity company, its technologies (from appliance and cloud based firewalls; to cloud delivered security services; to exabyte scale cloud security platforms) give 60,000 enterprise customers the power to protect billions of people worldwide. Now, this is a mission that I can get behind!

Product & Technology Opportunity

Imagine the opportunity to work at the intersection of (1) data and compute at massive scale, (2) building an enterprise-grade public cloud platform (3) enabling AI based innovations to revolutionize cybersecurity. This is the opportunity that drew me to Palo Alto Networks.

Over the last ~15 years I have had the privilege to be part of teams at Yahoo, Twitter and Pinterest that have built and operated platforms at massive scale. Providing infrastructure and platforms to support hundreds of millions of users is deeply rewarding and ever so humbling. The scale pushes you in new and creative ways every day. It pushes you to make the impossible possible every day. The scale at Palo Alto Networks is larger; and given the adversarial nature of cybersecurity its technical challenges much more complex. We aim to build a comprehensive cloud platform to ingest, process and transform large amounts of datasets in real-time. A cloud platform that simplifies data discoverability, data exploration and knowledge extraction. A cloud platform that enables a partner ecosystem of innovative security applications. This requires us to think big, innovate and to push through the boundaries of what technology can do today. We are doing this by delivering purpose-built platforms and contributing to open source technologies related to data processing, streaming, batch processing, storage, caching, query processing, data visualization, orchestration, web frameworks and user interfaces. Here is a fantastic write up by Arunabha Ghosh that talks about this in greater detail.

The Team

Not only does Palo Alto Networks they have the smartest minds in security, they have built an amazing team across all disciplines (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Add to that a culture that values collaboration, authenticity and innovation and you have an environment to have impact that is career defining.

When talking about the amazing team at Palo Alto Networks, you have to talk about Unit 42 -- Palo Alto Networks threat intelligence team who are superheroes in their own right. This snippet on Palo Alto Networks Wikipedia page really brought it home for me.

According to the  FBI, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 has helped solve multiple  cybercrime cases, such as the  Mirai Botnet and Clickfraud Botnet cases, the LuminosityLink  RAT case and assisted with “Operation Wire-Wire"

In 2018, Unit 42 discovered Gorgon, a hacking group believed to be operating out of  Pakistan and targeting government organizations in the  United Kingdom,  Spain,  Russia, and the  United States. 

In November 2018, Palo Alto Networks announced the discovery of "Cannon," a  trojan being used to target  United States and  European government entities. The  hackers behind the malware is believed to be  Fancy Bear, the  Russian hacking group believed to be responsible for  hacking the Democratic National Committee in 2016. 

If you found any of this intriguing, ping me on LinkedIn or on kgupta [at] paloaltonetworks.com. We are looking for engineers and engineering leaders who are passionate about infrastructure, platforms, distributed systems, big data, data analytics, cloud, site reliability, security, developer tools, web frameworks, user interfaces, APIs.

Join us in this journey of securing the world. Not all superheroes wear capes.