Today marks my last day as a Principal Engineer at Palo Alto Networks. I leave on (hopefully) good terms with my bosses and co-workers. This marks the first time I left a job that I currently enjoyed and probably merits another post on the reasons why I left.

I want to highlight a few things of my tenure at PANW.

XDR is an amazing product

Working with the XDR team at Palo Alto Networks is something I’ll never forget. The product itself is amazing for a few reasons.

1. It is a market defining technology on now which all others cyber security vendors are trying to keep up.
2. The pace of innovation in the space and on this team is staggering. Look at the 2020 Release Notes. Each release would consist of features that are arguably major versions of software. However, the XDR development team develops so fast that they consider many of them minor.

My role

I worked as a Principal Engineer on the XDR Team. Working in the devops/SRE space. Some accomplishments:

• Rewrote he provisioning stack for the lifecycle of a customer. (Create/Update/Delete)
  • Scaling customers from a few hundred to thousands and thousands.
  • Seem-less migrations/combinations for customers. XDR team got merged in from other products/teams an PANW, and with that migrations of their customers to XDR happened.
• Integrations with various products
  • As the sole US engineer for quite some time and the team being from Israel I did many meetings/feature gathering/implementation of integrations with other products.
• Deep dive, root cause, and fix core issues mostly related to speed or reliability.

Working with Israelis is awesome

Originally when I took this job, folks warned me (even my hiring manager) about cultural differences. Are you sure you want to work here? With us? The reality is I fit in well… maybe too well.

No coddling

Have you ever had a manager, co-worker, or maybe even a friend of a friend and you never know if they really like you or not? If they’re Isreali you probably don’t have the problem. You’ll know exactly what they think. I personally loved it. When I did get an attaboy from a higher up, I knew they meant it. My manager was a good listener and while he was serious, was also incredibly sincere. Which was the same feeling I got from most of my co-workers which has been unique in my work experience.

Speed, no excuses play like a champion

We were never the reason a project was delayed or was late. Always on time. If you said it was going to be ready Friday, it better be ready Friday. I like this kind of deadline, realizing others may not. I am a firm believer in that constraints breed creativity, there was definitely a lot of that.

I love Tel Aviv

Folks from Israel are very proud of their country. Tel Aviv is an amazing city. The food, entertainment, beaches, all were amazing. I enjoyed it so much I convinced my wife to join me on one of my trips. Only wishlist for me is that the beer scene was bigger! Some good brews, but not enough!