Staff Security Researcher (Xpanse)

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.

We have the vision of a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. These aren’t easy goals to accomplish – but we’re not here for easy. We’re here for better. 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.

We’re changing the nature of work. Palo Alto Networks is evolving to meet the needs of our employees now and in the future through FLEXWORK, our approach to how we work. From benefits to learning, location to leadership, we’ve rethought and recreated every aspect of the employee experience at Palo Alto Networks.  And because it FLEXes around each individual employee based on their individual choices, employees are empowered to push boundaries and help us all evolve, together.

Our Approach to Work

Our Team Culture

Cortex Xpanse’s Security Research Engineering team is a team of researchers with varied backgrounds and strengths - we've previously worked as Threat Intelligence Analysts, Software Engineers, Vulnerability Engineers, and Malware Analysts. We are united by our passion for vulnerability research and our commitment to an inclusive, low-ego team culture.

Our team is driven by:

• Thoroughness balanced by an inclination for action: We have high standards for the research we publish, but we also aim to push to production as quickly as possible.

• Strong collaboration and communication skills: We believe good research doesn't happen in isolation. Our team is very people-oriented, and we invest time in building positive relationships with each other and our collaborators.

• Psychological safety: We treat the team's culture as the air we breathe. Outcomes are not the only measure of success; how we get our work done is just as important. We believe people bring their best when they feel understood, supported, and safe to speak up, and we've created a framework for giving feedback and translating it into cultural changes.

Flexibility: We expect everyone to maintain a set of core hours every day when they're available to the team, but otherwise, your schedule is yours to decide. Whether you prefer to do research at night and run it by the team in the morning or you have school pick-up/drop-off during the day, we want everyone to have work-life balance and feel set up for success.

Job Description

Your Career

We’re looking for a Staff Security Researcher for Cortex Xpanse’s Security Research Engineering team. You will be responsible for the creation, validation and deployment of vulnerability signatures and protocol payloads which will be used by our scanning infrastructure to understand what vulnerabilities are exposed across customer networks. You will also be responsible for creating new policies, which encode risky device configurations as code that is run over observations from our global scanning data. You will be a key member of a team that proactively sources vulnerabilities and misconfigurations from newly discovered CVEs and responds to Xpanse customer requests.

Our mission is to find risks online and protect the world’s largest organizations from malicious software and hackers. Expanse’s Internet intelligence platform collects petabytes of Internet data, leverages artificial intelligence to discover “unknown unknown” risks for customers, and delivers those insights via a SaaS web application. On this team, you will directly contribute to our mission by defining and delivering on Expanse’s technical roadmap. 

Your Impact

• Contribute to Xpanse’s critical vulnerability response by implementing the necessary vulnerability signatures and payloads to detect presence of critical CVEs while effectively communicating with the Xpanse team, across the Cortex business unit, and across Palo Alto Networks

• Research trending threats and develop proof of concepts to detect presence of confirmed and inferred vulnerabilities

• Research and develop fingerprints that can help Xpanse identify and structure more and more types of services running on the global Internet

• Proactively add customer-requested policies and implement protocol payloads while minimizing false positives & false negatives

• Research emerging vulnerability threats on the global Internet and contribute to Cortex Research blogs/publications

Qualifications

Your Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Sci