Senior Staff Penetration Testing Engineer

About the role

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! We believe collaboration thrives in person. That’s why most of our teams work from the office full time, with flexibility when it’s needed. This model supports real-time problem-solving, stronger relationships, and the kind of precision that drives great outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Conduct comprehensive penetration tests across a diverse portfolio of cloud-native applications, large-scale infrastructure, and complex network architectures, covering all FedRAMP-mandated attack vectors.
• Execute multi-tenant isolation testing and segmentation validation.
• Identify, exploit, and document vulnerabilities in cloud services, container orchestration platforms, and automated deployment pipelines.
• Plan and lead assumed-breach, objective-based red team operations against systems — including lateral movement, privilege escalation, and persistence — to test the effectiveness of defensive controls, monitoring, and alerting systems.
• Integrate AI-assisted testing frameworks and LLM-driven automation into penetration testing workflows to accelerate threat discovery, analysis, and exploit development.
• Provide expert-level security guidance to SRE and Engineering teams during remediation planning and secure architectural design.
• Lead the security assessment of internal tooling, identity management systems, and third-party integrations.
• Research and develop custom tooling or scripts to automate testing and improve the efficiency of offensive engagements.
• Translate complex technical findings into high-impact reports and presentations for both technical stakeholders and executive leadership.
• Mentor junior team members and act as a subject matter expert on emerging threats and exploitation trends.

Pay

$152,300.00 - $246,400.00/yr. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus.