Principal Researcher

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

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.

Your Career

We are seeking a Principal Threat Intelligence Researcher for our Unit 42 Intelligence Response Unit. This team plays a critical role in providing timely, actionable threat intelligence and response capabilities to help protect our customers.

Your Impact

• As a Principal Threat Intelligence Researcher in the Intel Response Unit, your primary responsibilities will include:
• Internal Request for Information (RFI) Support: Deliver fused intelligence insights for priority internal stakeholders. Tailor content, empowering informed discussions with current and prospective customers, media, industry groups, and government organizations. Coordinate and deconflict responses with other Palo Alto Networks teams to ensure consistent messaging and inclusion of unique insights from across the company. Some requests will require rapid turn around time, which may include operating outside of normal business hours
• Client-facing RFI Support: Provide tailored research and analysis for client-based RFIs to drive business and security outcomes. Leverage the full weight of Palo Alto Network's unique data holdings, on-going research, cross-company capabilities, and externally sourced information. Assist leadership in creating a scalable solution to service multiple industries and similar stakeholder types. Recommend and help implement improvements to service support quality and speed to enhance the effectiveness and differentiation of our threat intelligence responses
• Anticipatory Threat Knowledge Creation: Develop structured intelligence insights tracking adversary trends, motivations, organizational priorities, and historical region and industry targeting patterns. This information will act as a backdrop to support intelligence production response for unfolding cyber events, exploitation trends, and threat actor campaigns
• External Engagements: Develop engaging and informative content, including customer briefings, threat reports, and updates on major cyber events. Share insights and expertise internally, with customers, and at security conferences
• Cross-Organizational Collaboration: Collaborate with threat analysts, consultants, and engineers from various teams and departments within the organization. Foster strong relationships and support joint efforts to address complex threats that span multiple areas of expertise
• Leverage AI for Analytic Workflows: Integrate Generative AI, NotebookLM, and other artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions across all phases of the intelligence lifecycle to improve analytic workflows. Use and develop new AI solutions to reduce research toil, query existing intelligence holdings, and accelerate report and presentation creation

Your Experience 

• Strong knowledge of cyber security threat actors, particularly their tactics, techniques, procedures, tooling, and noteworthy attacks
• Deep experience with cyber threat intelligence frameworks and analytical techniques preferred.
• Ability to contextualize cyber events, identify how the events fit into a current or historical pattern, and provide perspective relevant to a given stakeholder
• History of triaging and modeling open source data, telemetry, and other intelligence sources to quickly respond to requests for information. Preference for experience with Synapse or other hypergraphs
• Demonstrated ability to coordinate with cross-organizational threat analysts, facilitating collaboration, and aligning efforts to achieve common goals
• Experience with prompt engineering and leveraging Google's AI capabilities to support development of intelligence products
• Strong writing and presentation skills with the ability to communicate threat intelligence effectively to diverse audiences, including C-suite level customers
• Experience operating under short fuse deadlines, managing concurrent tasks, and thriving in complex and sometimes ambiguous situations
• Comfortable adapting to change as part of a growing team

The Team

Unit 42 brings together our world-renowned threat researchers with an elite team of security consultants to create an intelligence-driven, response ready organization. The Unit 42 Threat Intelligence team provides threat research that enables security teams to understand adversary intent and attribution, while enhancing protections offered by our products and services to stop advanced attacks. As threats escalate, Unit 42 is available to advise customers on the latest risks, assess their readiness, and help them recover when the worst occurs.

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  [email protected].

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.