Principal Applied AI Researcher — Security & Scale Lead

Jobs Paloaltonetworks; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 163,000 - 264,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Principal Applied AI Researcher to lead the Prisma AIRS Runtime Security team's vision and architecture. You will partner with executive leadership, product managers, ML engineers, and cross-functional teams to design enterprise-grade AI detection and protection solutions for runtime security.

You will drive continuous improvements in accuracy, latency, and throughput, mentor engineers, and shape research-to-product workflows with modern engineering best practices

Qualifications

• 8+ years of post‑academic ML experience; PhD or Master’s in CS/AI/Math.
• Expert in modern DL frameworks (PyTorch, JAX) and architectures (Transformers, LLMs).
• Experience with Generative AI, LLM stacks, LoRA/SFT, RAG, and LLM security.
• Track record of turning AI research into production, high throughput, low latency.
• Strong Python and software engineering practices; deploy models with inference servers and container orchestration.

Responsibilities

• Cross-Functional Delivery: lead collaboration with Product Mgmt, ML, and QE to deliver enterprise AI security offerings.
• Architectural & Security Problem-Solving: translate vision into production-ready AI detection models and backend architectures.
• Performance & Scale Optimization: identify bottlenecks and optimize throughput and latency at scale.
• Modern Engineering Best Practices: promote reproducible research pipelines and spec-driven development.
• Model Serving & Enterprise Infrastructure: design scalable model serving and integrate with backend services.
• Mentorship & Technical Excellence: mentor engineers/researchers and drive technical excellence.

Skills

Deep learning frameworks

Transformers/LLMs

LLM security

Production ML

Python programming

Technical communication

Education

PhD or Master’s in CS/AI/Math

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Docker

Kubernetes

vLLM

Triton

ONNX

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Principal Applied AI Researcher to lead the Prisma AIRS Runtime Security team's vision and architecture. You will partner with executive leadership, product managers, ML engineers, and cross-functional teams to design enterprise-grade AI detection and protection solutions for runtime security.

You will drive continuous improvements in accuracy, latency, and throughput, mentor engineers, and shape research-to-product workflows with modern engineering best practices