Principal ML Engineer, Hybrid AI Security Platform

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

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Senior ML Engineer to join the AIRS team in Santa Clara, CA, to design and deploy high-performance ML infrastructure for enterprise-scale threat classification and AI safety. This role focuses on leading ML initiatives across cloud environments and building scalable systems.

You will work with senior technologists on LLMs/SLMs, anomaly detection, and auto-classification, with a strong emphasis on rigorous model tuning and integration with product and security

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Computer Science or related field with 8+ years of software engineering experience including 3+ years in ML/NLP/AI systems.
• Proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Experience with LLMs/SLMs, prompt engineering, and model fine-tuning techniques.
• Strong background in building and scaling auto-classification and anomaly-detection models on large datasets.

Responsibilities

• Develop scalable anomaly detection pipelines to monitor cloud environments and AI agent actions, ensuring high efficacy with low false-positive and false-negative rates.
• Lead SLM tuning initiatives, optimizing models for low-latency, high-accuracy security tasks.
• Drive advanced data classification strategies using ML, NLP, and deep learning on massive datasets to extract threat patterns.
• Collaborate with product, security, and cloud engineering to integrate ML solutions into production systems.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

TensorFlow

LLMs/SLMs

Prompt engineering

Model fine-tuning

Anomaly detection

Auto-classification

Security concepts

AI safety

Graph data

GCP

AWS

Education

MS or PhD in Computer Science/Artificial Intelligence

Tools

DistilBERT

Open-source classification models

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Senior ML Engineer to join the AIRS team in Santa Clara, CA, to design and deploy high-performance ML infrastructure for enterprise-scale threat classification and AI safety. This role focuses on leading ML initiatives across cloud environments and building scalable systems.

You will work with senior technologists on LLMs/SLMs, anomaly detection, and auto-classification, with a strong emphasis on rigorous model tuning and integration with product and security