Principal Researcher

Company Description

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!

This role is remote, but distance is no barrier to impact. Our hybrid teams collaborate across geographies to solve big problems, stay close to our customers, and grow together. You will be part of a culture that values trust, accountability, and shared success where your work truly matters. 

Job Description

The Team

Unit 42 brings together our world-renowned threat researchers with an elite team of security consultants to create an intelligence-driven, response ready organization. The Unit 42 Threat Intelligence team provides threat research that enables security teams to understand adversary intent and attribution, while enhancing protections offered by our products and services to stop advanced attacks. As threats escalate, Unit 42 is available to advise customers on the latest risks, assess their readiness, and help them recover when the worst occurs.

Job Summary

We are seeking a Principal Threat Intelligence Researcher for our Unit 42 Intelligence Response Unit’s CTI Services Delivery Team. This team plays a critical role in creating timely, relevant, and actionable threat insights to drive business and security outcomes for our customers. The incumbent will play a critical role in understanding our customers intelligence needs and developing tailored intelligence that augment their existing capabilities. 

Key Responsibilities

The incumbent will play a critical role in understanding our customers intelligence needs and developing tailored intelligence that augment their existing capabilities

As a Principal Threat Intelligence Researcher in the Intel Response Unit, your primary responsibilities will include:

• Client-facing Briefing: Deliver fused intelligence insights on a recurring basis to clients across industry verticals focusing on relevant cyber threat activities, trends, and shifts in the cyber threat landscape trends. Custom tailored content should empower defensive actions for clients, providing their threat intelligence and security teams with key observations, insights, and perspective. Content creation will require performing independent research across internal data sets, commercial third party data, and open sources. This will also include leveraging existing Unit 42 intelligence publications and working with partners from internal intelligence teams
• Client-facing RFI Support: Provide tailored research and analysis for client-based RFIs to drive business and security outcomes. Leverage the full weight of Palo Alto Network's unique data holdings, on-going research, cross-company capabilities, and externally sourced information. Assist leadership in creating a scalable solution to service multiple industries and similar stakeholder types. Model research findings into Unit 42’s Threat Intelligence Knowledge Repository (TIKR). Provide recommendations  and help implement improvements to service support quality and speed to enhance the effectiveness and differentiation of our threat intelligence services. Some requests will require rapid turn around time, which may include operating outside of normal business hours
• Threat Profile Production: Create cyber threat profiles for clients to identify top cyber threat activities, groups, and trends relevant to a client’s unique business operations then provide tailored defensive recommendations. Work with clients to understand their operational footprint, business objectives, technology and security stacks, and areas of risk exposure. Develop MITRE ATT&CK workflows and heatmaps for top threat groups
• Anticipatory Threat Knowledge Creation: Develop structured intelligence insights tracking adversary trends, motivations, organizational priorities, and historical region and industry targeting patterns. This information will act as a backdrop to support intelligence production response for unfolding cyber even