Senior Staff Data Scientist

About Us

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. We weave AI into the fabric of everything we do and use it to augment the impact every individual can have. Collaboration thrives in person, with most teams working from the office full time (flexibility allowed when needed) to support real-time problem-solving, stronger relationships, and precision-driven outcomes.

About the Role

We are seeking a versatile Senior Staff Data Scientist to join our team and help shape the future of our business operations. This role is a unique hybrid of classical machine learning and applied AI. You will tackle diverse and impactful projects, from building predictive models that drive key business decisions to characterizing and optimizing the performance of our emerging AI agentic systems. You are an entrepreneurial problem-solver who thrives in ambiguous environments and enjoys bridging the gap between technical execution and business strategy. This is an in-office role, 3 days per week at our Santa Clara, CA headquarters.

Responsibilities

• Develop & Deploy Classical ML Models: Own the end-to-end lifecycle of machine learning projects. Build and productionize sophisticated models for critical business areas such as customer churn prediction, supply chain, and finance forecasting.
• Optimize AI Agentic Systems: Play a key role in our generative AI initiatives. Characterize, evaluate, and fine-tune AI agents—such as conversational systems that allow users to query massive datasets using natural language—to improve their accuracy, efficiency, and reliability.
• Partner with Business Stakeholders: Act as an internal consultant to marketing, sales, product, finance, and go-to-market teams. Translate business challenges into data science problems, identify opportunities for AI-driven solutions, and present findings in a clear, actionable manner.
• Own the Full Data Science Lifecycle: Cover the entire project workflow, from problem understanding and solution design to feature engineering, model selection and training, robust evaluation, deployment, and ongoing monitoring for performance degradation (in partnership with the data platform team).
• Data Storytelling: Visualize findings (using Tableau, Looker, or custom coding) to make complex data intuitive for business stakeholders.
• Collaboration: Partner closely with business teams to translate their goals into technical data requirements.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree with 5+ years of related experience; OR Master’s degree with 3+ years of related experience; OR PhD in a quantitative field (Computer Science, AI, Statistics, Physics, etc.) with 1+ years of experience (academic research applies).
• Strong foundation in statistics and probability theory and commonly used data science algorithms.
• Proven hands-on experience building and deploying machine learning models in a production environment.
• Expert-level programming skills in Python and familiarity with core data science and machine learning libraries (e.g., Scikit-learn, Pandas, PyTorch/TensorFlow, XGBoost).
• A solid command of SQL for complex querying and data manipulation.
• Proven ability to work autonomously, navigate ambiguity, and drive projects from concept to completion.
• Prior experience developing dashboards in Tableau, Looker, or similar data visualization platforms.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience with generative AI, including hands-on work with LLMs and frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, or the Hugging Face ecosystem.
• Experience in evaluating and optimizing the performance of AI systems or agents.
• Demonstrated expertise in specialized modeling domains such as causal inference, time-series analysis, or mix modeling.

Pay

The starting base salary for this position is expected to be in the range of $125,600.00 - $203,125.00 per year, depending on qualifications, experience, and work location. Compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus.

Benefits

A description of our employee benefits may be found here.

This role is eligible for immigration sponsorship.