Sr Data Scientist

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.

Who We Are

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.

The Information Technology (IT) team at Palo Alto Networks is a global organization that delivers technology and services to our employees, partners, and customers. We are a team of builders and innovators, focused on enabling the company's digital transformation and growth. We are responsible for the entire technology stack, from infrastructure and applications to data and security. Our mission is to provide a seamless and secure technology experience that empowers our people to do their best work.

We are seeking a versatile Sr Staff Data Scientist to shape our business operations through a unique hybrid of classical machine learning and applied AI. You will tackle diverse, impactful projects, from building predictive models that drive key business decisions to optimizing our emerging AI agentic systems. In this role, you will act as a builder and a strategic partner, translating business challenges into data science solutions and presenting findings to unlock new opportunities with data and AI.

• Own the end-to-end lifecycle of machine learning projects, building and product ionizing models for marketing attribution, customer churn, and finance forecasting.
• Characterize, evaluate, and fine‑tune generative AI agents, such as natural language conversational systems, to improve their accuracy, efficiency, and reliability.
• Act as an internal consultant, translating challenges from marketing, product, and finance teams into data science problems and AI‑driven solutions.
• Manage the full project workflow, from business problem discovery and feature engineering to model deployment and performance monitoring.
• Proactively collaborate and exchange information with Marketing and Product teams to translate business goals into technical data requirements and accomplish shared objectives.
• Develop intuitive data visualizations and dashboards using tools like Tableau or Looker to communicate complex findings to business stakeholders.
• Simplify complex processes by identifying opportunities for AI‑driven solutions and clearly presenting findings in an actionable manner.

• Bachelor’s degree with 5+ years of related experience; OR Master’s degree with 3+ years of related experience; OR a PhD in a quantitative field with 1+ years of experience.
• Strong foundational knowledge of statistics, probability theory, and common data science algorithms.
• Proven hands‑on experience building and deploying machine learning models in a production environment.
• Solid command of SQL for complex data querying, manipulation, and feature engineering.
• Demonstrated ability to work autonomously, navigate ambiguity, and drive projects from concept to completion.

• Direct experience with generative AI, including hands‑on work with LLMs and frameworks like Lang Chain, Llama Index, or the Hugging Face ecosystem.
• Experience in evaluating and optimizing the performance of AI systems or…