Senior AI Security Researcher - LLM Post-Training & Evals

Jobs Paloaltonetworks; 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 LLMs and autonomous AI agents. You will design training environments, develop security data, and build evaluators for vulnerability research, threat analysis, detection, and remediation.

You will collaborate with Security Researchers, ML Engineers, and product teams to translate real-world problems into measurable model improvements and deploy research into production.

Qualifications

• Strong hands-on experience in cybersecurity areas such as vulnerability research or secure coding.
• Experience with LLM-based systems for cybersecurity or code analysis.
• Experience designing datasets, benchmarks, graders, evaluation frameworks, or tasks with verifiable outcomes.
• Experience with post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, reward modeling, or distillation.
• Strong programming skills in Python and at least one system or application language (C, C++, Rust, Java, or Go).
• Experience with large codebases, security tools, testing frameworks, build systems, debuggers, and containerized environments.
• BS/MS degree in CS/ML/AI/Cybersecurity or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Design reproducible training and evaluation environments for complex cybersecurity tasks such as 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, and domain-specific validation methods.
• Design evaluations for security reasoning, code understanding, threat analysis, root-cause analysis, tool use, and autonomous task completion.
• Analyze model failures, data quality issues, grader weaknesses, reward hacking, and capability regressions.
• Develop and evaluate post-training methods, including supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization, reinforcement learning, and distillation.
• Collaborate with Security Researchers, ML Engineers, and product teams to move research into production capabilities.

Skills

Cybersecurity

LLM-based systems

Python

C/C++/Rust/Java/Go

Docker

Education

BS/MS in Computer Science / ML / AI / Cybersecurity

Tools

Docker

CI/CD

Build systems

Debugger

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Principal AI Researcher to advance cybersecurity capabilities of LLMs and autonomous AI agents. You will design training environments, develop security data, and build evaluators for vulnerability research, threat analysis, detection, and remediation.

You will collaborate with Security Researchers, ML Engineers, and product teams to translate real-world problems into measurable model improvements and deploy research into production.