Principal Machine Learning Engineer; AI-ML Data Scientist - ADEM

Position: Principal Machine Learning Engineer (AI-ML Data Scientist - ADEM)
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.

Job Summary Your Career Palo Alto Networks' ADEM group is seeking an accomplished Principal AI-ML / Data Scientist to serve as a principal technical anchor for our next-generation AIOps platform. In this role, you will bridge the gap between advanced AI research and production-grade backend software engineering, turning massive system telemetry into autonomous, self-healing capabilities.

You will lead the technical design of intelligent, agentic workflows while simultaneously playing a pivotal role in our core backend re-architecture. This role is ideal for a hands-on technical leader who thrives on building advanced reasoning systems, optimizing large-scale data foundations, and mentoring engineering teams to deliver planet-scale impact.

Your Impact Lead the design and implementation of ML/LLM/GenAI-powered agents capable of planning, multi-step execution, self-correction, and seamless collaboration with humans or other agents.

Build advanced reasoning pipelines, retrieval systems (RAG), and knowledge graph integrations that support autonomous task execution and network troubleshooting.

Build, fine-tune, or adapt LLMs, multimodal models, and specialized agent models. Successfully integrate traditional AI/ML and statistical models into these agentic workflows to handle complex endpoint telemetry.

Drive end-to-end solution development from prototype to production, ensuring maximum scalability, reliability, safety, observability, and performance.

Establish best practices for prompt design, agent memory management, tool usage, and context optimization within the agent ecosystem.

Continuously evaluate emerging agent frameworks, LLM tooling, and generative AI technologies to inform platform architecture and roadmap decisions.

Qualifications Your Experience8+ years in software engineering, with a track record of deploying production-grade ML, GenAI, or agentic workflows ong Python (for AI/ML) combined with professional Go or Java experience for backend microservices.

Hands-on experience with SQL, designing and restructuring Big Query schemas, and building/managing scalable data pipelines using Dataflow, Google ADK  and GKESolid understanding of retrieval systems (RAG), prompt engineering, model evaluation, and statistical modeling.

Ability to build platform-level services that integrate cleanly with adjacent ecosystems (e.g., Prisma Access, Cortex).BS/MS in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or a related field.

Knowledge of L3-L7 networking is desirable . Compensation Disclosure The compensation offered for…