Lead AI Security Researcher — LLM Training & Evaluation

Palo Alto Networks; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 163,000 - 264,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Principal AI Researcher to advance cybersecurity capabilities of large language models and autonomous AI agents. You will combine security research, rigorous evaluation, and applied LLM post-training to strengthen vulnerability research, threat analysis, detection, and autonomous security workflows.

You will collaborate across security research, ML engineering, and product teams to translate real-world cybersecurity problems into measurable model improvements,

Qualifications

• Strong hands-on experience in cybersecurity areas such as vulnerability research, secure coding, threat detection, malware analysis, incident investigation, reverse engineering, fuzzing, or security automation.

Responsibilities

• Design reproducible training and evaluation environments for complex cybersecurity tasks, including vulnerability research, threat analysis, detection, investigation, remediation, secure coding, and autonomous security workflows.
• Transform source-code repositories, vulnerabilities, security incidents, malware samples, threat intelligence, detection logic, patches, test harnesses, and security tools into structured tasks for LLMs and AI agents.
• Develop high-quality security datasets, including synthetic data, hard negatives, adversarial examples, expert annotations, and model-generated trajectories.
• Build reliable graders, verifiers, and reward signals using tests, compilation, runtime behavior, security-tool outputs, detection results, vulnerability reproduction, and other domain-specific validation methods.
• Design evaluations for security reasoning, code understanding, threat analysis, root-cause analysis, tool use, long-horizon execution, and autonomous task completion.
• Analyze model failures, data quality issues, grader weaknesses, reward hacking, benchmark overfitting, and capability regressions.
• Develop and evaluate post-training methods, including supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization, reinforcement learning, reward modeling, rejection sampling, and distillation.
• Build iterative model-improvement loops using model rollouts, verifier feedback, expert review, synthetic data generation, and failure-driven data collection.
• Conduct controlled experiments with appropriate baselines, ablations, and regression testing.
• Collaborate with Security Researchers, ML Engineers, infrastructure teams, and product teams to move research into production capabilities.

Skills

Python

C/C++

LLM systems

Cybersecurity

Containerized environments

Education

BS/MS in CS/ML/AI/Cybersecurity

Tools

Docker

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Principal AI Researcher to advance cybersecurity capabilities of large language models and autonomous AI agents. You will combine security research, rigorous evaluation, and applied LLM post-training to strengthen vulnerability research, threat analysis, detection, and autonomous security workflows.

You will collaborate across security research, ML engineering, and product teams to translate real-world cybersecurity problems into measurable model improvements,