Sr Principal Machine Learning Engineer Cortex

Your Career

Were seeking a talented and experienced Sr Principal AI Researcher to join the Cortex Foundational Artificial Intelligence Research Team.  Our team mission is to make leadingedge AI systems perform better at cybersecurity.  We are building and improving foundational capabilities in cybersecurity systems using Large Language Models Reasoning Models Generative AI Knowledge Graphs Agentic AI Model Finetuning/Distilling and Retrieval Augmented Generation to be leveraged for future cybersecurity products.  

If you have a passion for Artificial Intelligence Research applied to real world problems join us to expand our teams ability to produce new technology and advancements in AI.  You will work with a highly experienced multidisciplinary and diverse group of AI Machine Learning Engineering and Cybersecurity experts both in our team and across the company. The ideal candidate enjoys collaboration open ended problem solving and rolling up your sleeves to find a pragmatic solution that pushes the team and our mission forward we celebrate learning results from iterative datadriven experiments.  This role does not require prior Cybersecurity expertise but you will definitely learn about Cybersecurity technology on the job through working in the domain with teammates!

Your Impact

• Advance the state of the art in Cybersecurity through applied research in Large Language Models Transformerbased Encoders Natural Language and Structured Data Processing Generative AI Agentic AI and Deep Learning.

• Design and implement research experiments to demonstrate increased accuracy efficiency and helpfulness of novel AI systems and techniques.

• Train and finetune largescale language models using GPUaccelerated infrastructure.

• Develop and implement evaluation metrics for assessing model quality efficiency and robustness.

• Stay at the forefront of AI advancements and integrate stateoftheart techniques into our models.

• Collaborate with engineers to translate research into productionready AI systems.

• Communicate with AI experts throughout the organization to share research findings and  technical progress.

• Publish findings in toptier AI/ML conferences and journals and participate in relevant conferences and workshops to share knowledge and stay current with industry trends.

Qualifications :

Your Experience 

• Published research in AI/ML with an advanced degree in Computer Science Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Statistics or a related field or equivalent published research experience

• 7 years of relevant experience in AI

• Proven expertise in training finetuning and evaluating LLMs and with GPUaccelerated model training

• Proficiency in deep learning frameworks distributed training techniques and largescale datasets

• Excellent research programming skills in Python and familiarity with CUDA TensorRT or other GPU optimization tools  

• Have a strong working knowledge of machine learning algorithms such as LLMs CNNs LSTMs XGBoost/CatBoost Byte Pair Encoding schemes etc.

• Strong problemsolving skills and the ability to work both independently and collaboratively

• Excellent written and verbal communication

• Thrives when working on openended problems without known solutions

The Ideal Candidate Would Have One of More of the Following:

• Experience with transformer models in domains beyond text (structured data tabular data multimodal visionlanguage audiotext etc.)

• Knowledge of model distillation quantization or pruning techniques

• Experience with distributed cloud systems like GCP or AWS and containerization tools like Docker a plus

• Previous experience applying AI/ML techniques to cybersecurity problems

• Knowledge of data privacy and security considerations in AI/ML

• A solid network of AI Researchers you can reach out to for ideas and external collaboration

Additional Information :

The Team

You will work with a highly experienced multidisciplinary and diverse group of AI and Machine Learning experts bringing your unique value as the cybersecurity domain expert. The ideal candidate enjoys collaboration open ended problem solving and rolling up your sleeves to find a pragmatic solution that pushes the team and our mission forward we celebrate learning results quickly from iterative datadriven experiments. This role does not require prior AI expertise but you will definitely learn about AI technology on the job so please apply if you have expertise in cybersecurity research and would like to expand your scope to helping build AI systems that can learn from your experience!

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 nonsales roles) or base salary commission target (for sales/commissioned roles) is expected to be between $170000 $277000/YR. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found here.  

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Our Commitment

Were problem solvers that take risks and challenge cybersecuritys status quo. Its simple: we cant 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.