AI-Driven Vulnerability Research Lead

Jobs Paloaltonetworks; California; Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 226,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Sr Staff Security Researcher to lead AI-assisted vulnerability research, focusing on the design, implementation, and improvement of AI/security harnesses for discovering, validating, and reporting high-impact vulnerabilities in real-world software and open-source projects.

You will leverage LLMs, AI agents, fuzzing, static and dynamic analysis, reverse engineering, exploitability analysis, and security automation to build reliable workflows for vulnerability

Qualifications

• Master's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• Demonstrated ability to drive a technical research project from problem formulation to implementation and reporting.
• Evidence of original security research or high-signal technical output (CVEs, responsible disclosures, bug bounties, papers, GitHub projects, open-source tools).
• 5+ years of experience in vulnerability research, offensive security, reverse engineering, fuzzing, exploit development, or related roles.
• Experience in vulnerability research, reverse engineering, fuzzing, exploit development, root-cause analysis, exploitability assessment, PoC development, patch analysis, or security tooling.
• Experience designing reproducible security experiments, including target setup, harness development, validation logic, evaluation metrics, or false-positive analysis.
• Strong programming skills and knowledge of OS, networks, software vulnerabilities, and exploitation techniques.
• Strong written communication skills to document methods, evidence, and remediation guidance clearly.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and improve AI/security harnesses for vulnerability research with reproducibility and clear evidence generation.
• Produce high-quality research artifacts, including validated findings, root-cause analyses, reports, benchmarks, or CVEs.
• Conduct deep technical analysis across real-world software and open-source projects (reverse engineering, fuzzing, exploitability assessment, patch analysis, PoC validation).
• Build reusable research infrastructure (target setup automation, harnesses, AI agent workflows, benchmarks, validation oracles, triage pipelines, reporting workflows).
• Use LLMs, AI agents, fuzzing, static/dynamic analysis, program analysis, and automation to improve research quality and reliability.
• Analyze large-scale harness outputs to identify new research opportunities and improve future harness capabilities.

Skills

Vulnerability research

Reverse engineering

Fuzzing

Exploit development

Program analysis

Security automation

Technical writing

Scripting languages

Education

Master's degree in Computer Science/Cybersecurity or related field

PhD in Computer Science/Cybersecurity or related field

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Sr Staff Security Researcher to lead AI-assisted vulnerability research, focusing on the design, implementation, and improvement of AI/security harnesses for discovering, validating, and reporting high-impact vulnerabilities in real-world software and open-source projects.

You will leverage LLMs, AI agents, fuzzing, static and dynamic analysis, reverse engineering, exploitability analysis, and security automation to build reliable workflows for vulnerability