Principal Product Manager - Synthetic Monitoring / Digital Experience Monitoring (Cortex XCOR/Chronosphere)

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!

Job Summary

About our team:

Cortex XCOR is Palo Alto Networks' observability platform optimized for containerized environments. It optimizes costs, reduces data complexity by up to 89%, and enables faster issue remediation for industry leaders like DoorDash, Affirm, and Zillow.

XCOR Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) directly connects end-user experience insights with underlying backend observability, answering a question infrastructure dashboards cannot: are my users having a good experience? A slow service stops being a one dimensional chart and becomes a representation of a slow path through checkout: from the user who experienced it, to the service, the deploy, and the query responsible. By integrating synthetic and real-user data into the broader service stack, XCOR allows teams, from SREs to executives, to trace user-impacting issues from symptom to root cause seamlessly.

DEM has two sides. Real user monitoring tells you what your customers experienced on their device, their network, their browser, in the moment it mattered. Synthetic monitoring tells you whether the journeys you care most about work right now, tested deliberately and continuously, from the places your customers are, whether or not anyone happens to be using them. 

Job Summary

We are looking for a Principal Product Manager to own synthetic monitoring for Cortex XCOR. You will translate front-end testing requirements from SREs and frontend developers (browser click-paths, multi-step API journeys, and underlying protocol checks) into a unified product that can be defined as code and executed globally or within customer networks.

In collaboration with the RUM team, you will unify synthetic and real-user monitoring data so that synthetic failures seamlessly correlate with affected user cohorts.

This is an early-stage build role where you will drive the core decisions defining the product.

Qualifications

Key Responsibilities

• Conduct primary research with SREs, front-end developers, and platform teams to understand current journey-testing workflows and pain points.
• Maintain close contact with customers, design partners, and field teams through discovery calls and interviews.
• Participate in sales calls where synthetic coverage is critical, gathering feedback to inform roadmap prioritization.
• Partner with engineers and technical stakeholders to articulate, scope, and deliver one coherent product.
• Build on XCOR's industry-leading observability platform so that synthetic results arrive as OpenTelemetry-native signals and correlate with the metrics, traces, and logs teams already have.
• Own the execution model: how tests are scheduled, where they run, what a customer is charged for, and how they keep control of it.
• Partner with the RUM product team to integrate synthetic and real user data into unified customer workflows.
• Set KPIs to articulate and measure intended value and impact for customers.
• Own the roadmap end to end: build it, sequence it, communicate it, and keep the team and the business aligned on its evolution.
• Lead across teams to ensure cohesive features and workflows are seamless across the platform.
• Partner with product marketing on positioning, messaging, and go-to-market strategy.

What you will achieve

You are joining while the product is still being designed. That is the point of the role, and it sets the pace.

In your first 30 days, you will analyze the market, engage in active design discussions, meet with customers, and identify key gaps to establish ownership of the product strategy.

Within six months, you will establish a competitive product offering, defining key performance metrics, addressing critical competitive gaps, and delivering a sequenced plan for the team to build against.

This suits someone who is energized by an empty page and a short runway, and who can hold a strong opinion about a product that does not exist yet.

Qualifications

You'll need:

• 10+ years of experience as a product manager, with deep knowledge of enterprise software.
• Experience with monitoring, testing, or developer infrastructure products such as synthetic monitoring, end-to-end browser testing, API testing, or CI/CD tooling.
• Working knowledge of how modern web applications are tested end to end: browser automation (Playwright, Selenium, Cypress), HTTP and API testing, and the protocol layer underneath (DNS, TCP, TLS).
• A track record of taking a product from zero to one
• The presence to carry this in the room. You'll present to the customer's senior leadership and to our own executives, and be the one answering the hard questions.
• A history of shipping with agile processes and tight feedback loops.
• An obsession with getting the little details right.
• Demonstrated ability to leverage AI in the Product Development Lifecycle for everything from document writing to prototyping while ensuring your own thoughts and ideas are well represented in content. Agents are used to reduce toil, not as a replacement for critical thinking skills.

Helpful, not required:

• Familiarity with observability in general, OpenTelemetry specifically and how telemetry data is collected, correlated, and stored.
• Experience building AI Native products with knowledge around building and/or maintaining MCP server(s).
• Familiarity with the digital experience monitoring category and how real user and synthetic data get used together. Core Web Vitals, user journeys, JavaScript exceptions and what each one can and cannot tell you.
• Comfort with test-as-code and infrastructure-as-code workflows, and with the CI/CD pipelines engineering teams run them in.
• Experience building and operating software as a service, including the unit economics of running customer workloads.
• Experience with design-led product development principles and best practices

Location

US - Remote

Compensation Disclosure

The compensation offered for this position will depend on qualifications, experience, and work location. For candidates who receive an offer at the posted level, the starting base salary (for non-sales roles) or base salary + commission target (for sales/com-missioned roles) is expected to be the annual range listed below. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found here.

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.