Principal AI Engineer (Office of the CPO: Innovation Team)

Company Description

Our Mission

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.

Who We Are

We take our mission of protecting the digital way of life seriously. We are relentless in protecting our customers and we believe that the unique ideas of every member of our team contributes to our collective success. Our values were crowdsourced by employees and are brought to life through each of us everyday - from disruptive innovation and collaboration, to execution. From showing up for each other with integrity to creating an environment where we all feel included.

As a member of our team, you will be shaping the future of cybersecurity. We work fast, value ongoing learning, and we respect each employee as a unique individual. Knowing we all have different needs, our development and personal wellbeing programs are designed to give you choice in how you are supported. This includes our FLEXBenefits wellbeing spending account with over 1,000 eligible items selected by employees, our mental and financial health resources, and our personalized learning opportunities - just to name a few!

At Palo Alto Networks, we believe in the power of collaboration and value in-person interactions. This is why our employees generally work full time from our office with flexibility offered where needed. This setup fosters casual conversations, problem-solving, and trusted relationships. Our goal is to create an environment where we all win with precision.

Job Description

Your Career

As a Principal AI Engineer in the Office of the Chief Product Officer: Innovation Team, you will shape the next generation of AI-powered security and developer-productivity solutions. You will lead exploratory research, rapid prototyping, and cross-functional pilots that fuse state-of-the-art foundation models with Palo Alto Networks' security platforms.

Your Impact

• Drive end-to-end AI integrations with frontier models (Anthropic Claude 4, OpenAI GPT-4o, Google Gemini, open-source LLMs) across text, code, image, and multimodal domains.
• Prototype and benchmark MCP and A2A protocols to enable dynamic orchestration of multiple agents and tools.
• Lead context engineering & prompt design for RAG and agentic workflows; create evaluation harnesses to measure accuracy, latency, and cost.
• Build proof-of-concepts that embed AI throughout the software-development life-cycle (SDLC)-planning, coding, code review, testing, and release-to quantify productivity gains.
• Research and validate AI-driven cybersecurity use-cases (e.g., threat-hunting copilots, real-time anomaly triage) and partner with product groups to harden prototypes for production.
• Instrument metrics pipelines that track developer and security-analyst outcomes to demonstrate ROI of AI initiatives.
• Craft executive-level narratives, demos, and visualizations that clearly communicate innovation roadmaps, technical trade-offs, and business impact.
• Mentor senior engineers and researchers; foster a culture of experimentation, responsible AI, and security-first thinking.

Qualifications

Your Experience

• 10+ years in software/ML engineering, with 2+ years leading applied Generative AI or LLM initiatives at scale.
• Proven expertise in:
  
  
  • Large Language & Multimodal Models: fine-tuning, RAG, alignment, hallucination testing.
  • Distributed systems & MLOps: containerized inference, model-versioning, feature stores.
  • Programming: Python (required) plus one of Go, Java, Javascript.
  • Cloud AI stacks (Google Cloud Platform Vertex, AWS SageMaker, Azure ML) and vector databases.
• Hands-on experience integrating AI into developer tooling (IDE plug-ins, CI/CD, observability dashboards).
• Deep understanding of cybersecurity concepts (attack vectors, threat intelligence, MITRE ATT&CK) and ability to translate them into AI features.
• Strong communication skills; comfortable presenting to VP/C-suite audiences and external conferences.
• B.S. or higher in CS, EE, Mathematics, or related field; M.S./Ph.D. preferred.

Additional Information

The Team

You will join a small, fast-moving Innovation Team inside the CPO's office that partners with Product Engineering, Unit 42 research, and Field CTOs to incubate breakthrough capabilities before scaling them company-wide.

Compensation Disclosure

The compensation offered for this position will depend on qualifications, experience, and work location. For candidates who receive an offer at the posted level, the starting base salary (for non-sales roles) or base salary + commission target (for sales/commissioned roles) is expected to be between $147,000-237,500/YR. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found here.

Our Commitment

We're problem solvers that take risks and challenge cybersecurity's status quo. It's simple: we can't accomplish our mission without diverse teams innovating, together.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for all qualified individuals with a disability. If you require assistance or accommodation due to a disability or special need, please contact us at

Palo Alto Networks is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity in our workplace, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or other legally protected characteristics.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Is role eligible for Immigration Sponsorship?: Yes