Sr Staff Security Researcher (AI-Assisted Vulnerability Research)
Palo Alto Networks1 day ago
Base Salary
$140k - $226k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and improve AI/security harnesses for reproducible vulnerability discovery, validation, exploitability analysis, false-positive reduction, and evidence generation.
- Produce security research artifacts including validated findings, root-cause analyses, technical reports, benchmarks, open-source tools, responsible disclosures, publications, and CVEs where appropriate.
- Perform reverse engineering, fuzzing, root-cause analysis, exploitability assessment, patch analysis, variant analysis, and proof-of-concept validation across real-world and open-source software.
- Build research infrastructure including target setup automation, fuzzing harnesses, AI agent workflows, benchmark environments, validation oracles, triage pipelines, evaluation metrics, and reporting workflows.
- Use LLMs, AI agents, fuzzing, static and dynamic analysis, program analysis, reverse engineering automation, and security automation to improve vulnerability research workflows.
- Analyze large-scale harness outputs, validation traces, false positives, patch comparisons, and target patterns to identify research opportunities and improve harness capabilities.
Requirements
- Master’s degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 5+ years of experience in vulnerability research, offensive security research, reverse engineering, fuzzing, exploit development, program analysis, security automation, or a closely related security research role.
- Demonstrated ability to independently drive a technical research project from problem formulation through implementation, evaluation, and written results.
- Evidence of original security research or high-signal technical output such as CVEs, responsible disclosures, bug bounty findings, security papers, technical writeups, GitHub projects, fuzzers, harnesses, exploit analyses, benchmarks, or open-source security tools.
- Experience designing or building reproducible security experiments involving target setup, harness development, validation logic, oracle design, evaluation metrics, false-positive analysis, or reporting workflows.
- Strong programming skills and knowledge of modern operating systems, network protocols, application security, vulnerability classes, and exploitation or validation techniques.
- Strong written communication skills for documenting methods, evidence, limitations, reproduction steps, impact, and remediation guidance.
- Preferred qualifications include a PhD or equivalent demonstrated research experience, AI agent or fuzzing harness experience, end-to-end vulnerability handling, expertise in relevant security domains, strong practical research artifacts, and maintainer relationships or disclosure experience.
Benefits
- The role is primarily office-based, with flexibility when needed.
- Employee benefits are available through the company’s benefits program.
- The compensation package may also include restricted stock units and a bonus.
Categories
About Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks builds cybersecurity products for enterprises and governments, including next-generation firewalls, cloud security (Prisma Cloud/Prisma Access), and SOC tools (Cortex). It sells subscriptions and appliances with cloud-delivered threat intelligence, securing networks, endpoints, and applications across data centers and public clouds. Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, the company is publicly traded on the NYSE under the ticker PANW.