Principal Security Researcher

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!

We believe collaboration thrives in person. That’s why most of our teams work from the office full time, with flexibility when it’s needed. This model supports real-time problem-solving, stronger relationships, and the kind of precision that drives great outcomes.

Job Summary

Your Career

You will be part of the team that builds and delivers the threat detection capabilities powering Palo Alto Networks’ Advanced Threat Prevention (ATP). The ATP detection team is responsible for decoding network protocols, identifying applications, and detecting threats across our enterprise customers’ networks.

As a Principal Security Researcher, you will play a key technical leadership role in shaping how ATP detects and prevents real-world attacks. You will propose and drive innovative technical ideas from concept to production, own multiple projects or a broader technical area with measurable impact, and provide technical leadership to other researchers or developers. This is a hands-on leadership role: you are expected to define direction, make technical decisions, and contribute directly to vulnerability research, exploit analysis, and production detection work.

Your Impact

• Shape ATP detection strategy by identifying important vulnerability, exploit, and attack technique areas where new or improved protections are needed.

• Drive innovative detection ideas from concept to production, delivering measurable improvements in coverage, quality, speed, or scalability.

• Improve rapid response capability for zero-days, high-impact CVEs, and emerging attack vectors by guiding technical assessment, detection strategy, and release decisions.

• Raise the quality and consistency of IPS protections by defining detection approaches, validation expectations, and technical review standards for complex cases.

• Expand the team’s ability to deliver protections at scale through practical automation, detection pipeline improvements, and AI-assisted research workflows.

• Provide hands-on technical leadership to researchers or developers through direction, review, problem decomposition, and execution guidance.

• Influence cross-functional decisions with product, QA, engineering, and research partners to ensure detections are technically sound, customer-relevant, and production-ready.

Qualifications

• Deep hands-on experience in vulnerability research, exploit analysis, IPS/IDS detection, offensive security, or closely related threat prevention work.

• Proven ability to identify important technical problems, propose detection ideas, drive execution, and deliver measurable product or customer impact.

• Deep understanding of common 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, PoC behavior, network traffic, protocol behavior, application-layer attack patterns, and detection tradeoffs.

• Experience translating vulnerability or exploit understanding into production-quality IPS signatures, IDS detections, network detections, or other customer-facing protections.

• Strong understanding of network protocols and application-layer behavior, especially HTTP, DNS, SMB, FTP, SMTP, TCP/UDP, TLS, and related protocols.

• Strong programming or scripting skills for research automation, tooling, test generation, detection development, or pipeline improvements.