Principal Machine Learning Engineer (AI Research)

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.

Our vision is a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. 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.

Who We Are

We take our mission of protecting the digital way of life seriously. We are relentless in protecting our customers and we believe that the unique ideas of every member of our team contributes to our collective success. Our values were crowdsourced by employees and are brought to life through each of us everyday - from disruptive innovation and collaboration, to execution. From showing up for each other with integrity to creating an environment where we all feel included.

As a member of our team, you will be shaping the future of cybersecurity. We work fast, value ongoing learning, and we respect each employee as a unique individual. Knowing we all have different needs, our development and personal wellbeing programs are designed to give you choice in how you are supported. This includes our FLEXBenefits wellbeing spending account with over 1,000 eligible items selected by employees, our mental and financial health resources, and our personalized learning opportunities - just to name a few!

At Palo Alto Networks, we believe in the power of collaboration and value in-person interactions. This is why our employees generally work full time from our office with flexibility offered where needed. This setup fosters casual conversations, problem-solving, and trusted relationships. Our goal is to create an environment where we all win with precision.

Your Career

We are looking for an experienced brilliant Data Scientist who can code that wants to make a career out of using machine learning to address security problems. Our team finds solutions to hard problems, is innovative in finding data, builds models, and puts them into production. We produce several patents every year.

Your Impact

• Apply Machine Learning to security problems in a production environment
• Come up with innovative solutions to meaningful hard problems
• Work on distributed clusters and GPUs with large amounts of data
• Interact with teams of expert engineers, security researchers, and data scientists
• Build models that protect our customers from malicious code and actors

Your Experience 

• 5+years, MS, or PhD degree in Computer Science, Statistics, a related field or equivalent military experience required
• Be an excellent programmer - experience with distributed cloud systems like GCS or AWS and containers like Docker a plus
• Please highlight your deep learning experience on your resume
• Have a strong working knowledge of machine learning algorithms such as LLMs, CNNs, LSTMs, XGBoost/CatBoost, Byte Pair Encoding schemes, etc.
• Be comfortable working independently, have the ability to come up with novel solutions to difficult problems
• Excellent communication (written and verbal) and presentation skills

The Team

To stay ahead of the curve, it’s critical to know where the curve is, and how to anticipate the changes we may be facing. For the fastest growing cybersecurity company, the curve is the evolution of cyberattacks, and the products and services that proactively address them. As a predictive enterprise environment, we analyze petabytes of data that pass through our walls daily and we hire the most talented minds in data science to build creative predictive analytics and data science solutions for our cybersecurity solutions.

Compensation Disclosure

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 between $151000 - $246500/YR. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found here.

Our Commitment



We’re problem solvers that take risks and challenge cybersecurity’s status quo. It’s simple: we can’t accomplish our mission without diverse teams innovating, together.

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  [email protected].

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