Principal Engineer - Security & Detections; Prisma AIRS

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks®, we’re united by a shared mission—to protect our digital way of life. We thrive at the intersection of innovation and impact, solving real-world problems with cutting‑edge technology and bold thinking. Here, everyone has a voice, and every idea counts. If you’re ready to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who are just as passionate as you are, you’re in the right place.

In order to be the cybersecurity partner of choice, we must trailblaze the path and shape the future of our industry. This is something our employees work at each day and is defined by our values:
Disruption, Collaboration, Execution, Integrity, and Inclusion. We weave AI into the fabric of everything we do and use it to augment the impact every individual can have. If you are passionate about solving real-world problems and ideating beside the best and the brightest, we invite you to join us! We believe collaboration thrives in person. That’s why most of our teams work from the office full time, with flexibility when it’s needed.

This model supports real‑time problem‑solving, stronger relationships, and the kind of precision that drives great outcomes.

Joining the AIRS Team

Palo Alto Networks is pioneering the world’s most comprehensive AI security platform through Prisma AIRS—protecting complex ecosystems of AI models, applications, and agents from development through runtime. As part of this mission, we are building a brand-new initiative on the AIRS team focused on advancing state‑of‑the‑art AI/ML infrastructure and high-performance, distributed backend systems. We are recruiting senior technical leaders to drive this architecture from the ground up across the following levels:
Sr. Staff Engineer | Principal Engineer | Sr. Principal Engineer.

Note:

All roles are hybrid based on‑site (3x/week) at our corporate Headquarters in Santa Clara, CA.

As a Security / Detection Engineer, you will analyze multi‑stage attack behavior sequences and translate complex threat patterns into highly deterministic signatures. You will own the end‑to‑end detection lifecycle—from rule creation to continuous false‑positive (FP) tuning—ensuring our defense mechanisms are performant, accurate, and resilient against evasion.

• Analyze complex, multi-stage attack behavior sequences and transform them into precise, deterministic signatures.
• Develop and maintain high-performance signatures that can be safely enforced by our inline engines without impacting network throughput.
• Own the entire signature lifecycle, from initial research and threat modeling to deployment, automated regression testing, and deprecation.
• Drive continuous False Positive (FP) tuning and validation processes to minimize alert fatigue while maximizing true positive detection rates.
• Implement robust version pinning strategies and dependency management for threat prevention content updates, ensuring consistency across distributed firewall deployments.
• Partner with threat research groups and inline machine learning teams to integrate behavioral signatures with automated deep learning classifiers.

Required

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Cyber Security, or equivalent practical experience with 8+ years of dedicated experience in detection engineering, threat analysis, or security research.

• Deep expertise in writing and optimizing signature-based patterns.

• Thorough understanding of application-layer evasion techniques.

• Strong knowledge of the detection‑as‑code philosophy and building automated testing pipelines for signature validation.

• AI Security Frameworks:
  Familiarity with AI Risk &…