Principal Security Researcher

About the role

The Principal Security Researcher role within Palo Alto Networks is dedicated to building and delivering threat detection capabilities that power the company's Advanced Threat Prevention (ATP) solutions. This role involves proposing and driving innovative technical ideas from concept to production, owning multiple projects or broader technical areas, and providing technical leadership to other researchers or developers.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.
• Strong 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.
• Experience translating vulnerability or exploit understanding into production-quality IPS signatures, IDS detections, network detections, or other customer-facing protections.
• Strong programming or scripting skills for research automation, tooling, test generation, detection development, or pipeline improvements.
• Ability to lead complex technical work under ambiguity, guide other researchers or developers, and make sound technical decisions under time pressure.
• Experience using AI, ML, automation, or research tooling to improve security analysis, detection development, validation, or response workflows is highly desirable.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to influence technical direction across research, product, QA, and engineering partners.
• Foundational understanding of AI security scenarios or AI-assisted security workflows is a plus.

Compensation

The compensation offered for this position will depend on qualifications, experience, and work location. For candidates who receive an offer at the posted level, the starting base salary (for non-sales roles) or base salary + commission target (for sales/commissioned roles) is expected to be the annual range listed below. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found here. $162,700.00 - $263,175.00/yr

Our Commitment

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for all qualified individuals with a disability. If you require assistance or accommodation due to a disability or special need, please contact us at accommodations@paloaltonetworks.com. Palo Alto Networks is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity in our workplace, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or other legally protected characteristics. All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines. Is role eligible for Immigration Sponsorship?: Yes