Principal Researcher

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!

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.

Job Summary

We are seeking a Principal Threat Intelligence Researcher for Unit 42’s Threat Intelligence Delivery Execution (TIDE) Team. This team plays a critical role in creating timely, relevant, and actionable threat insights to drive business and security outcomes for our customers. We are looking for a high performing, experienced CTI analyst with a strong track record in understanding CTI stakeholder intelligence needs and developing tailored intelligence in line with their security use cases. 

As a Principal Threat Intelligence Researcher in the Intel Response Unit, your primary responsibilities will include:

• Client-facing Briefing: Deliver fused intelligence insights on a recurring basis to clients across industry verticals focusing on relevant cyber threat activities, trends, and shifts in the cyber threat landscape trends. Custom tailored content should empower defensive actions for clients, providing their threat intelligence and security teams with key observations, insights, and perspective. Content creation will require performing independent research across internal data sets, commercial third party data, and open sources. This will also include leveraging existing Unit 42 intelligence publications and working with partners from internal intelligence teams. 
   
• 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. Model research findings into Unit 42’s Threat Intelligence Knowledge Repository (TIKR). Provide recommendations  and help implement improvements to service support quality and speed to enhance the effectiveness and differentiation of our threat intelligence services. Some requests will require rapid turn around time, which may include operating outside of normal business hours.
   
• Threat Profile Production: Create cyber threat profiles for clients to identify top cyber threat activities, groups, and trends relevant to a client’s unique business operations then provide tailored defensive recommendations. Work with clients to understand their operational footprint, business objectives, technology and security stacks, and areas of risk exposure. Develop MITRE ATT&CK workflows and heatmaps for top threat groups. 
   
• 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. Collaborate with other Unit 42 CTI SMEs in fusion cells to expand research and existing collateral on threat groups.
   
• Peer Empowerment: Act as a resource for colleagues, sharing expertise and best practices to enhance team capabilities. Provide guidance to grow technical and strategic research acumen through personalized or group brown bag sessions. 
   
• 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.

Qualifications

Required

• 7 years minimum in the CTI field with experience in threat research, analytic production, and client-facing delivery.

• Strong knowledge of cyber threat actors, noteworthy attacks, and ability to quickly recognize inflection points, signalling shifts, evolution, or deviation from threat activity baselines or industry norms.

• Ability to contextualize cyber events, identify how the events fit into a current or historical pattern, the impact on an industry or organization, and tailored defensive recommendations.

• Experience operating under short fuse deadlines, managing concurrent tasks, and thriving in complex and sometimes ambiguous situations.

• Strong writing and presentation skills with the ability to communicate threat intelligence effectively to diverse audiences, including C-suite level customers.

• Deep experience with cyber threat intelligence frameworks and analytical techniques preferred.

• 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.

• Comfortable adapting to change as part of a growing team.

• Must be a self-starter and creative thinker.
   

Preference for

• History of triaging and modeling open source data, telemetry, and other intelligence sources to quickly respond to requests for information. Ideally with previous experience in Synapse or other hypergraphs.

• Experience serving as a CTI analyst supporting customers in vendor space.

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/com-missioned roles) is expected to be the annual range listed below. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found here.

$162,700.00 - $263,175.00/yr

Our Commitment

We’re trailblazers that dream big, 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.

Is role eligible for Immigration Sponsorship? No. Please note that we will not sponsor applicants for work visas for this position.