Distinguished AI Engineer (Office of the CTO)

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!

We believe collaboration thrives in person. That’s why most of our teams work from the office full time, with flexibility when it’s needed. This model supports real-time problem-solving, stronger relationships, and the kind of precision that drives great outcomes.

Job Summary

Your Career

As a Distinguished AI Engineer in the Office of the CTO (OCTO), you will shape the next of AI-powered security and developer-productivity solutions. You will lead exploratory research, rapid prototyping, and cross-functional pilots that fuse state-of-the-art foundation models with Palo Alto Networks’ security platforms.

Your Impact

Drive end-to-end AI integrations with industry-leading foundation models (e.g., current frontier LLMs) across text, code, image, and multimodal domains.

Prototype and benchmark MCP and A2A protocols to enable dynamic orchestration of multiple agents and tools

Lead context engineering & prompt design for RAG and agentic workflows; create evaluation harnesses to measure accuracy, latency, and cost

Build proof-of-concepts that embed AI throughout the software-development life-cycle (SDLC)—planning, coding, code review, testing, and release—to quantify productivity gains

Research and validate AI-driven cybersecurity use-cases (e.g., threat-hunting copilots, real-time anomaly triage) and partner with product groups to harden prototypes for production.

Instrument metrics pipelines that track developer and security-analyst outcomes to demonstrate ROI of AI initiatives

Craft executive-level narratives, demos, and visualizations that clearly communicate innovation roadmaps, technical trade-offs, and business impact

Mentor senior engineers and researchers; foster a culture of experimentation, responsible AI, and security-first thinking

Lead strategic external partnerships and technical advocacy, collaborating with major industry partners to shape defensive AI product roadmaps.

Engage with policy and ethics working groups to ensure responsible and compliant AI deployment, including navigating legal and corporate communications reviews.

Qualifications

• Your Experience
• 10+ years in software/ML engineering, with 2+ years leading applied Generative AI or LLM initiatives at scale.
• Proven expertise in: Large & Multimodal Models: fine-tuning, RAG, alignment, hallucination testing.
• Distributed systems & MLOps: containerized inference, model-versioning, feature stores.
• Programming: Python (required) plus one of Go, Java, Javascript.
• Cloud AI stacks (GCP Vertex, AWS SageMaker, Azure ML) and vector databases.
• Hands-on experience integrating AI into developer tooling (IDE plug-ins, CI/CD, observability dashboards).
• Deep understanding of cybersecurity concepts (attack vectors, threat intelligence, MITRE ATT&CK) and ability to translate them into AI features.
• Strong communication skills; comfortable presenting to VP/C-suite audiences, driving cross-functional alignment, and representing technical strategy at external conferences.
• B.S. or higher in CS, EE, Mathematics, or related field; M.S./Ph.D. or equivalent military experience
• Proven track record of mentorship and technical leadership across organizational boundaries.

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.

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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.