Principal Machine Learning Engineer; 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 an AI/ML Engineer, you will be at the forefront of developing advanced intelligent systems that safeguard cloud infrastructure and secure AI model implementations. You will operate at the intersection of machine learning, cloud security, and AI safety, deploying autonomous solutions that actively classify threats, tune models, and prevent adversarial attacks.

You will tackle complex real‑world problems, develop novel algorithms, and deploy them into production at scale to ensure our customers can confidently deploy AI‑driven innovation.

• Develop scalable anomaly detection pipelines to monitor cloud environments and AI agent actions, ensuring high efficacy with low false‑positive and false‑negative rates.
• Lead SLM (Small Language Model) tuning initiatives, optimizing and fine‑tuning models for low‑latency, highly accurate edge‑cloud security tasks.
• Drive advanced data classification strategies, applying machine learning, NLP, and deep learning methods to massive structured and unstructured datasets to extract complex threat patterns.
• Be a technical leader who partners closely with product, security, and cloud engineering teams to integrate these ML solutions seamlessly into production systems.

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Statistics, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience) with 8+ years of software engineering industry experience, including a minimum of 3 years dedicated to machine learning, NLP, or AI systems.
• Programming & Frameworks:
  Deep programming expertise in Python and strong hands‑on experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or Tensor Flow.
• Large/Small Language Models:
  Proven experience working directly with LLMs/SLMs, advanced prompt engineering, and model fine‑tuning techniques.
• Core…