Senior Principal Researcher; Unit

Company Description

At Palo Alto Networks® everything starts and ends with our mission:
Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.

Our vision is a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. We are a company built on the foundation of challenging and disrupting the way things are done, and we’re looking for innovators who are as committed to shaping the future of cybersecurity as we are.

This role is remote, but distance is no barrier to impact. Our hybrid teams collaborate across geographies to solve big problems, stay close to our customers, and grow together. You will be part of a culture that values trust, accountability, and shared success where your work truly matters.

We are seeking a Senior Principal, Cyber Threat Intelligence on our Fusion Intelligence Team (FIT), which is part of the Intel Response Unit within our broader Unit 42 Threat Intelligence organization. FIT’s mission is to conduct accelerated threat intelligence collection and analysis with a focus on pivoting from open-source intelligence to internal holdings to contextualize, cluster, and develop insights into emerging and ongoing threat activity.

You will have the opportunity to collaborate with world‑class researchers and engineers across Palo Alto Networks, ensuring high‑caliber intelligence drives additional cyber threat intel research, consultant engagements, customer and executive insights, and product integrations.

• Leverage unique data holdings and partner across teams: harness the full weight of the company’s unique data holdings, including product telemetry, front‑line Incident Response (IR) data, and partner information, to produce and communicate the most unique and valuable insights.
• Produce Intelligence Bulletins, Threat Briefs, and other shareable content based on unique findings derived from the team’s analysis.
• Partner with other research and product teams to build joint capabilities and ensure findings are leveraged to the full extent.
• Accelerate OSINT fusion: integrate open source technical sources with other available data to build a more complete cyber threat intelligence picture and conduct accelerated analysis to enhance the organization’s threat intelligence knowledge repository.
• Ensure continuous updates to threat actor, industry, region, and malware profiles and enhance team workflows to improve the scalability and effectiveness of the team’s analytical capabilities.
• Lead technical projects: work directly with Unit 42 engineering to improve team workflows and processes, and lead innovative projects within the team and across Unit 42 that drive forward efficiency and effectiveness.
• Contribute to external engagement: amplify Unit 42 presence and credibility in the marketplace through thought leadership, including speaking engagements and publishing threat research.
• Leverage AI for analytic workflows: integrate Generative AI, Notebook
  
  LM, and other AI/ML solutions across all phases of the intelligence lifecycle to improve analytic workflows, reduce research toil, and accelerate report and presentation creation.
• Mentor and review technical analysis: mentor other researchers and support the growth of overall team capabilities, acting as an authority for review of team products to ensure technical accuracy and alignment to strategic vision.

• 10+ years of experience.
• Expert technical experience in Cyber Threat Intelligence, including actionable knowledge of cyber adversary groups, tactics, and techniques, malware analysis, and hunting methodologies.
• Strong experience with hypergraph modeling and clustering process‑level details within the context of threat activity.
• Ability to contextualize cyber events, identify how the events fit into a current or historical pattern, assess the impact on an industry or organization, and provide tailored defensive recommendations.
• Ability to leverage multiple telemetry types and intelligence sources to generate unique insights into potential threats and associate malicious activity.
• Highly organized with the ability to manage multiple tasks,…