Sr Staff Software Engineer (Web Security)

Company Description

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks® everything starts and ends with our mission:

Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.

Our vision is a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. We are a company built on the foundation of challenging and disrupting the way things are done, and we’re looking for innovators who are as committed to shaping the future of cybersecurity as we are.

FLEXWORK is an employee-centric reimagining of how we work. We built FLEXWORK based on employee feedback – it is about flexibility, trust, and choice whenever possible. It’s been a journey of disruption that has yielded the best of our values. We offer as much flexibility as possible, and choices that enable you to be most productive, including benefits that meet your needs and learning opportunities that you feel passionate about.

Job Description

Your Career

We are looking for a motivated and creative Senior Engineer to join our research team to develop, build, and maintain innovative threat detection systems and infrastructure for protecting customers against constantly evolving online threats and attacks. 

The Web Security Research team is responsible for delivering high quality content to our products to prevent successful cyberattacks and protect our customers, with a special focus on Web security, DNS security, Network security, and data-driven methods.

We expect office-based employees to be in the office four days per week, with one day working from where they choose. We believe being together facilitates casual conversations and those magic moments where we can work on issues and ideas informally. These moments build capability and deepen trusted relationships and allow our people to feel safe in taking risks and being disruptive. Like so many companies, we are working through the details and things could change …. but in general if a role is deemed office-based we want our teams to be together four days per week.

Your Impact

• Design and build scalable and extensible threat prevention and detection systems
• Innovate new ways to identify and block malicious websites and URLs
• Implement and maintain complex software pipelines and data infrastructure with challenging requirements for high quality and performance 
• Leverage data-driven approaches, such as statistical analysis, machine learning, and other AI techniques
• Convert research results and discoveries into real-impact innovative products
• Work closely with threat researchers and other teams to gather requirements, design architecture and write design documents
• Improve product development and release processes

Qualifications

Your Experience

• Creative thinker and team player with a passion for building high quality, complex systems as a part of an incredible research team
• Fullstack engineer who can learn and adapt to new programming languages and technologies
• Self-motivated and passionate in data-driven security research
• Experienced in Web security and developing protection systems
• Strong programming skills in Python, JavaScript/Node.js, Go, Shell scripting
• Knowledge and experience with modern databases and Big Data tools, such as ELK stack, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, RabbitMQ is a plus
• Experience with graph databases (e.g. Neo4j, JanusGraph), graph-based analysis, and data visualization tools like D3.js is a plus
• Knowledge and experience with Docker, Kubernetes and Google Cloud Platform
• Advanced experience with GCP technologies (GKE, Pub/Sub, Bigtable, BigQuery,  Dataflow, Dataproc) is a plus
• Strong experience with developing REST APIs and microservices is a plus
• Knowledge and experience in basic machine learning techniques, workflows and algorithms, such as k-NN, Naive Bayes, SVM, Decision Trees, Logistic Regression, Deep Learning, and Boosting is a plus
• Familiarity with TensorFlow is a plus
• Experience with web crawling and malicious URL detection is a plus
• Experience with malware traffic analysis is a plus
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and source control best practices, unit tests, application security best practices
• Excellent communication (written and verbal) and presentation skills
• BS/MS in Computer Science or related fields with security research experience 
• Past experience on open source projects is a plus

Additional Information

The Team

We define the industry, instead of waiting for directions. We need individuals who feel comfortable in ambiguity, excited by the prospect of a challenge, and empowered by the unknown risks facing our everyday lives that are only enabled by a secure digi