Senior AI Security Researcher: LLM Post-Training & Evals

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

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Sr Principal AI Researcher to advance cybersecurity capabilities of large language models and autonomous AI agents. You will design training environments, build high-quality security data, and develop post-training methods spanning vulnerability research, threat analysis, detection, and remediation.

You will collaborate with Security Researchers, ML Engineers, infrastructure teams, and product teams to translate research into production-ready capabilities that

Qualifications

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, or related field.
• Experience designing datasets, benchmarks, graders, evaluation frameworks, or tasks with verifiable outcomes.
• Experience with at least one post-training or model-adaptation method, such as supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, or distillation.
• Experience training or evaluating code-focused or cybersecurity-focused language models and autonomous agents.
• Strong programming skills in Python and at least one system or application language (C, C++, Rust, Java, Go).

Responsibilities

• Design reproducible training and evaluation environments for 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.

Skills

Cybersecurity research

LLM-based systems

Python programming

Codebase experience

Containerized environments

Education

BS/MS in Computer Science, ML, AI, or related field

Tools

Containers

CI/CD pipelines

Build systems

Debuggers

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Sr Principal AI Researcher to advance cybersecurity capabilities of large language models and autonomous AI agents. You will design training environments, build high-quality security data, and develop post-training methods spanning vulnerability research, threat analysis, detection, and remediation.

You will collaborate with Security Researchers, ML Engineers, infrastructure teams, and product teams to translate research into production-ready capabilities that