Drimva

Palo Alto Networks

Principal Machine Learning Engineer (Prisma AIRS)

$163K–$264K

Office - USA - CA - Headquarters · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 2, 2026

Experience
8+ years of software engineering industry experience, including a minimum of 3 years dedicated to machine learning, NLP, or AI systems.
Education
MS or PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Statistics, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).
Visa sponsorship
Immigration sponsorship: Yes

About the job

Leads the design and deployment of scalable ML infrastructure and autonomous security solutions that detect threats, tune models, and defend AI systems at enterprise scale.

What you'll do

  • Develop anomaly-detection pipelines for cloud environments and AI agent actions.
  • Lead small language model tuning and data-classification strategies using ML, NLP, and deep learning.
  • Partner with product, security, and cloud engineering teams to integrate ML solutions into production.

What they ask for

  • MS or PhD in a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
  • 8+ years of software engineering industry experience, including at least 3 years in machine learning, NLP, or AI systems.
  • Deep Python expertise and hands-on experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow.
  • Experience with LLMs/SLMs, prompt engineering, model fine-tuning, and scalable auto-classification or anomaly-detection models.

Nice to have

  • Knowledge of cybersecurity and AI safety vulnerabilities; familiarity with DistilBERT and other open-source classification models.
  • Familiarity with graph-based datasets and distributed cloud systems (GCP or AWS), including scalable ML inference pipelines.

Pay

$163,200.00 - $264,000.00 USD/year base salary

Tools

Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, LLMs, SLMs, DistilBERT, GCP, AWS

AI focus

Builds ML security infrastructure, anomaly detection and data classification systems, and tunes SLMs to protect AI models, applications, and agents from threats and adversarial attacks.

Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative

First seen Oct 28, 2026 · Last verified Nov 5, 2026 (UTC)