Palo Alto Networks
Principal Applied AI Researcher (Prisma AIRS)
$163K–$264K
Santa Clara, United States of America · No · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 6, 2026
- Experience
- 8 years with a Bachelor’s degree; or 6 years and a Master’s degree; or a PhD with 3 years experience; or equivalent experience.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree; or Master’s degree; or PhD; or equivalent experience.
- Visa sponsorship
- Immigration sponsorship: Yes
About the job
Leads research and engineering for production AI detection and protection systems in the Prisma AIRS Runtime Security product, including model development, evaluation, and serving.
What you'll do
- Architect, train, fine-tune, and optimize AI models and backend systems for runtime security.
- Build data, evaluation, monitoring, and scalable model-serving pipelines for production deployments.
- Lead cross-functional work and mentor researchers and engineers.
What they ask for
- Mastery of deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch and hands-on experience with Transformers and LLMs.
- Experience with the modern LLM stack, guardrails, and alignment techniques.
- Track record moving AI research or prototypes into high-throughput, low-latency production systems at scale.
- Advanced Python and software engineering skills, including deploying models with high-performance inference servers such as vLLM or Triton.
Pay
$163,200.00 - $264,000.00/yr USD base salary
Tools
PyTorch, Transformers, LLMs, Python, PEFT, LoRA, DPO, vLLM
AI focus
Applied AI research and engineering for runtime security: AI threat detection, guardrails, domain-specific foundation models, model evaluation and monitoring, and low-latency production inference.
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