Senior Principal Threat Detection Engineer

Palo Alto Networks; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 184,000 - 297,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks seeks a Security / Detection Engineer to analyze multi‑stage attack behavior and translate it into deterministic, high‑quality signatures. You will own end‑to‑end detection from rule creation to FP tuning, ensuring performance and resilience against evasion.

You will collaborate with threat research groups and inline machine learning teams to advance detection capabilities and maintain robust content updates across distributed deployments.

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in writing and optimizing signature-based patterns.
• Experience with threat analysis and security research.
• Knowledge of evasion techniques and defense strategies.
• Experience building automated testing pipelines for signatures.

Responsibilities

• Analyze multi-stage attack behavior sequences and translate them into deterministic signatures.
• Develop and maintain high-performance signatures for inline engines without impacting throughput.
• Own the signature lifecycle from research to deployment, testing, and deprecation.
• Drive FP tuning to minimize alerts while maximizing true positives.
• Implement version pinning and dependency management for content updates.
• Collaborate with threat research and ML teams to integrate signatures with classifiers.

Skills

Signature development

Threat analysis

Evasion defense

Detection-as-code

Education

BS/MS in Computer Science or Cyber Security

Tools

Python

Regex

Job description

Palo Alto Networks seeks a Security / Detection Engineer to analyze multi‑stage attack behavior and translate it into deterministic, high‑quality signatures. You will own end‑to‑end detection from rule creation to FP tuning, ensuring performance and resilience against evasion.

You will collaborate with threat research groups and inline machine learning teams to advance detection capabilities and maintain robust content updates across distributed deployments.