Principal Security Researcher (Advanced Threat Prevention)
Palo Alto Networks20 days ago
Base Salary
$172k - $278k/yr
Responsibilities
- Shape threat detection strategy by identifying vulnerability, exploit, and attack technique areas requiring new or improved protections.
- Drive detection concepts through production and deliver measurable improvements in coverage, quality, speed, or scalability.
- Guide rapid response to zero-days, high-impact CVEs, and emerging attack vectors.
- Define IPS protection approaches, validation expectations, and technical review standards.
- Improve detection pipelines through automation and AI-assisted research workflows.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership, direction, review, and execution guidance to researchers and developers.
- Partner with product, QA, engineering, and research teams to deliver technically sound, customer-relevant, production-ready detections.
Requirements
- Deep hands-on experience in vulnerability research, exploit analysis, IPS/IDS detection, offensive security, or related threat prevention work.
- Proven ability to identify technical problems, propose detection ideas, drive execution, and deliver measurable impact.
- Deep understanding of vulnerability classes and exploit techniques including memory corruption, injection, authentication bypass, path traversal, SSRF, RCE, XSS, SQL injection, CSRF, MITM, and DoS.
- Strong ability to analyze vulnerability root cause, exploitability, proof-of-concept behavior, network traffic, protocol behavior, application-layer attacks, and detection tradeoffs.
- Experience translating vulnerability and exploit analysis into production-quality IPS signatures, IDS detections, network detections, or other customer-facing protections.
- Strong understanding of HTTP, DNS, SMB, FTP, SMTP, TCP/UDP, TLS, and related network protocols.
- Strong programming or scripting skills for research automation, tooling, test generation, detection development, or pipeline improvements.
- Ability to lead complex technical work under ambiguity and make sound technical decisions under time pressure.
- Experience with AI, ML, automation, or research tooling for security analysis, detection development, validation, or response is highly desirable.
- Foundational understanding of AI security scenarios or AI-assisted security workflows is a plus.
- Strong communication skills and ability to influence technical direction across research, product, QA, and engineering partners.
- BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Cybersecurity, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
Benefits
- Most teams work from the office full time, with flexibility when needed.
- The company provides reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities or special needs.
- The company is committed to equal employment opportunity and inclusive hiring.
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.