Sr. Staff Security Engineer, Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT)

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.

Who We Are

We take our mission of protecting the digital way of life seriously. We are relentless in protecting our customers and we believe that the unique ideas of every member of our team contributes to our collective success. Our values were crowdsourced by employees and are brought to life through each of us everyday - from disruptive innovation and collaboration, to execution. From showing up for each other with integrity to creating an environment where we all feel included.

As a member of our team, you will be shaping the future of cybersecurity. We work fast, value ongoing learning, and we respect each employee as a unique individual. Knowing we all have different needs, our development and personal wellbeing programs are designed to give you choice in how you are supported. This includes our FLEXBenefits wellbeing spending account with over 1,000 eligible items selected by employees, our mental and financial health resources, and our personalized learning opportunities - just to name a few!

At Palo Alto Networks, we believe in the power of collaboration and value in-person interactions. This is why our employees generally work full time from our office with flexibility offered where needed. This setup fosters casual conversations, problem-solving, and trusted relationships. Our goal is to create an environment where we all win with precision.

Job Description

Your Career

As a Senior Staff PSIRT Engineer, you will play a critical role in protecting Palo Alto Networks products and services by leading complex vulnerability investigations and response efforts from start to finish. You will serve as a senior technical expert in the Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT), driving deep technical analysis, root cause determination, and remediation guidance for product security issues.

This role demands a high level of technical acumen, cross-functional collaboration, and the ability to navigate sensitive situations with both internal teams and external stakeholders such as customers, security researchers, and industry partners.

Your Impact

• Lead the technical investigation of reported security vulnerabilities in products and cloud offerings, including reproduction, impact analysis, and severity scoring (e.g., CVSS).
• Drive root cause analysis and partner with product engineering teams to develop, validate, and verify remediations.
• Collaborate closely with product, engineering, legal, privacy, support, sales, and threat intelligence teams to ensure aligned vulnerability handling and response strategies.
• Engage directly with customers, security researchers, and industry partners to discuss vulnerability details, mitigation steps, and disclosure timelines.
• Maintain deep familiarity with industry vulnerability handling standards and organizations such as CNA, NIST, FIRST, and OpenSSF.
• Contribute to the continuous improvement of PSIRT workflows, automation, and tooling to accelerate vulnerability detection, analysis, and remediation.
• Mentor junior engineers in vulnerability research, triage, and incident response methodologies.
• Produce high-quality technical documentation, incident reports, and executive summaries for both internal and external audiences.
• Stay up-to-date on emerging threats, exploitation techniques, and security research trends to proactively strengthen product security posture.

Qualifications

Your Experience 

• 4+ years in product security, application security, vulnerability research, or related fields, with significant hands-on experience in vulnerability investigation and exploitation analysis.
• Strong expertise in reverse engineering, debugging, and secure software development practices.
• Demonstrated ability to reproduce, analyze, and assess the exploitability of complex vulnerabilities in large-scale systems or cloud environments.
• Deep familiarity with CVSS, CVE, and public vulnerability databases.
• Experience handling responsible disclosure and coordinating with external researchers and industry partners.
• Practical knowledge of secure coding guidelines, memory corruption mitigation, and common vulnerability classes (e.g., buffer overflows, SQLi, XSS, deserialization).
• Strong written and verbal communication skills,