Senior Data Scientist: AI & ML Solutions Architect

Palo Alto Networks, Inc.; Santa Clara (CA); Hybrid; USD 126,000 - 203,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks, Inc. in Santa Clara, CA, is seeking a Senior Staff Data Scientist to join our in-office team three days a week.

This role blends classical ML with applied AI to influence business decisions and optimize AI agentic systems. You will own end-to-end data science projects, partner with marketing, sales, product, and finance, and deliver data-driven recommendations with clear visuals using Tableau or Looker.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree with 5+ years of related experience or Master’s with 3+ years, or PhD with 1+ year (academic research applies).
• Strong foundation in statistics and probability theory and commonly used data science algorithms.
• Proven hands-on experience building and deploying machine learning models in a production environment.
• Expert-level programming in Python and familiarity with core data science libraries (Scikit-learn, Pandas, PyTorch/TensorFlow, XGBoost).
• Solid SQL skills for complex querying and data manipulation.
• Proven ability to work autonomously, navigate ambiguity, and drive projects from concept to completion.
• Experience developing dashboards in Tableau/Looker or similar data viz platform.

Responsibilities

• Develop & Deploy Classical ML Models: End-to-end lifecycle of ML projects for business areas like churn, forecasting.
• Optimize AI Agentic Systems: Evaluate and fine-tune AI agents to improve accuracy and efficiency.
• Partner with Business Stakeholders: Translate business challenges into data science problems and present actionable findings.
• Own the Full Data Science Lifecycle: From problem framing to deployment and monitoring with the data platform team.
• Data storytelling: Visualize findings to make data intuitive for stakeholders.
• Collaboration: Align with business partners to translate goals into data requirements.

Skills

Statistics & Probability

Python programming

SQL querying

ML model deployment

Education

Bachelor's degree in a quantitative field

Master's degree in a quantitative field

PhD in Computer Science/AI/Statistics/Physics

Tools

Scikit-learn

Pandas

PyTorch

TensorFlow

XGBoost

Job description

Palo Alto Networks, Inc. in Santa Clara, CA, is seeking a Senior Staff Data Scientist to join our in-office team three days a week.

This role blends classical ML with applied AI to influence business decisions and optimize AI agentic systems. You will own end-to-end data science projects, partner with marketing, sales, product, and finance, and deliver data-driven recommendations with clear visuals using Tableau or Looker.