Principal Researcher - Qa jobs at Palo Alto in India, Bengaluru

Key Responsibilities

• Strategic Technical Leadership: Act as the highest level of technical authority. You will hold peer-to-peer conversations with Engineering and Customers to drive permanent resolution on complex architectural issues, ensuring supportability is a key consideration in organizational and product decisions
• AI & Automation Strategy: Drive AI-led workflow improvements and automation efforts across GCS. Your goal is to achieve specific, measurable outcomes including significant Case Avoidance and Case Deflection, while drastically reducing Time to Resolution (TTR) and Time to Connect (TTC)
• Champion Serviceability & Scalability: Influence the product development lifecycle by advocating for improved serviceability and scalability in new and existing products. Collaborate closely with Product Management and Engineering to incorporate critical support requirements early in the design phase
• Engineer Enablement: Develop and deliver cutting-edge training programs, technical deep dives, and enablement content for our Technical Assistance Center (TAC) engineers, ensuring the global team is ready to expertly support complex Cloud and SASE architectures
• Root Cause Elimination: Systematically analyze root causes of recurring, high-impact issues. Collaborate directly with Engineering to implement permanent product fixes and process improvements, minimizing customer impact and elevating the overall support experience

Required Qualifications

• Professional Experience: 10+ years of progressive experience in technical support, engineering, or a related field within the networking and security industry
• Core Domain Expertise: Deep and comprehensive understanding of TCP/IP, routing protocols (BGP, OSPF), and complex LAN/WAN architectures
• Expertise in network security concepts and technologies, including firewalls, VPNs (IPSEC, SSL), PKI, and intrusion prevention systems
• Extensive, hands-on background in SASE and SD-WAN technologies.
• Cloud & Deployment Fluency: Significant exposure to solutions deployed across major Public Clouds (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) and Private Clouds
• Proven track record of leading, managing, and implementing successful, high-impact technical projects
• Operational Background: Proven experience working in Security, Network, and/or IT Operations environments
• Experience developing and implementing Technical Support strategy and successfully mentoring Senior Technical Staff
• Automation & AI Skills: Demonstrated experience applying AI/ML concepts to operational workflows or support processes for tangible business outcomes
• Expertise with scripting languages (e.g., Python) for Automation and utilizing effective tools to achieve Case Avoidance and Deflection targets
• Soft Skills & Authority: Exceptional communication skills with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts clearly and persuasively to both highly technical and non-technical executive audiences.
• Proven ability to influence product direction by effectively collaborating with Product Management and Engineering teams

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.

Your Career

We are seeking a Principal Researcher in Security Content Validation to lead the testing and validation of efficacy of detection rules. This role requires an expert-level Python coder with a deep background in advanced QA methodologies, dedicated to researching, designing, and implementing automation frameworks that ensure the highest fidelity and scalability of Security Content validation.

Your Impact

• This Principal-level role is central to securing our customers' cloud environments by driving innovative research into quality assurance and developing high-fidelity validation content.

• Designing, developing, and maintaining expert-level automated testing and validation frameworks (leveraging expert Python skills) to ensure the accuracy, and scalability of security detection rules and overall product stability.

• Researching and applying emerging QA technologies (e.g., AI/ML-driven testing) for security detection rules validation, including investigating complex failure modes and architectural weaknesses to develop innovative detection/prevention strategies (the "Secure QA Mindset")

• Establishing and enforcing best practices for high-fidelity security content validation, including rigorous test case creation and management for compliance standards and threat detection.

• Actively contributing to ongoing process enhancements in test automation, Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and deployment practices, serving as the authority on quality process design.

• Mentorship: Serving as a technical leader, coaching and guiding QA engineers and researchers on advanced testing techniques and research methodologies.

• Communication: Clearly articulating complex quality metrics, research findings, and validation strategies to engineering teams, product management, and executive leadership.

• Bonus - Establishing industry thought leadership by publishing insightful blogs on security domain.

Your Experience

• Overall Experience: 8-10 years of experience in Quality Assurance, SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test), QA Research.

• Ideal - 5+ years of experience specifically designing and architecting test automation frameworks for complex systems, preferably in the security or cloud domain.

• Must Have - Expert-level proficiency in Python programming for building complex, scalable test automation frameworks, and security validation tools

• Must Have - Deep application of QA principles, including rigorous quality gates and functional policy testing, strong debugging skills in cloud native deployments, and exceptional written and verbal communication.

• Must Have - At least 3 years of hands-on experience in public cloud technologies (AWS, GCP, or Azure) with an understanding of cloud resource configurations and security requirements.

• Highly Desirable - Very good understanding of Computer Networks, Cloud Networks, and Web-based protocols (like HTTP/S, REST) with a deep security understanding of vulnerabilities, exploits, and defensive techniques related to them.

• Highly Desirable - Experience with advanced QA concepts like combinatorial testing, model-based testing, or leveraging GenAI/LLM based automations for test generation or defect analysis.

• Highly Desirable - Familiarity with development tools (Git, CI/CD, bug tracking) and experience with technologies (SQL, BigQuery, JSON) for validation and data analysis..

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.

Palo Alto Networks continues to build a world-class product management services portfolio and is looking for a Product Manager for the Network Security team. This role requires a strong leader who will be responsible for the Network Security Management product line. In addition to your own creativity, you will rely on interaction with customers, partners, sales, product managers, and cross-functional partners to understand requirements and needs. You will be expected to define and deliver competitive service offerings that help provide a more complete product experience for our customers. Other responsibilities include collaborating with Product Marketing, Technical Marketing Engineers to create product-related sales and marketing materials and evangelizing the services both internally and externally. Given the nature of your portfolio, your success will be highly dependent on how well you can interact with and guide cross-functional organizations within Palo Alto Networks, including Product, IT, Support, Professional Services, Consulting Engineers, Customer Success, Finance, Sales, and Operations.

Your Impact

• In-depth Data Analysis: Perform comprehensive, data-driven analysis encompassing a wide spectrum of customer deployments, diverse use cases, and intricate network topologies spanning small to large enterprise environments. This includes identifying key trends, patterns, and insights to inform product decisions and strategies.
• Champion Product Excellence: Drive and meticulously maintain exceptionally high standards for product quality, ensuring the long-term stability and unwavering reliability of both Prisma SD-WAN and the broader Prisma SASE platform. This involves proactive identification and mitigation of potential issues.
• Strategic Product Leadership: Define a clear and compelling product strategy aligned with market needs and technological advancements. Oversee the entire execution lifecycle, from initial concept to final delivery, and guarantee successful customer outcomes across all stages, including quoting, purchasing, activation, onboarding, configuration, ongoing visibility, proactive monitoring, and renewal.
• AI-Powered Innovation: Actively leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to drive significant innovation across WAN and LAN networking domains, as well as cloud-based services, throughout every phase of the product lifecycle, from initial design to continuous improvement and optimization.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Foster and maintain strong, effective collaborative relationships with engineering teams to guide development, Technical Assistance Center (TAC) for efficient support, customer support organizations for seamless issue resolution, and sales teams to enable successful customer acquisition and expansion.
• Proactive Test Strategy Assurance: Rigorously ensure the development and meticulous review of comprehensive test strategies specifically tailored for diverse SD-WAN deployment scenarios. This proactive approach is critical to guaranteeing consistently positive post-sales experiences and achieving desired customer outcomes.
• PoC/PoV Oversight and Enhancement: Critically review Proof of Concept (PoC) and Proof of Value (PoV) plans, providing constructive feedback and guidance to ensure these engagements effectively highlight the key and differentiating capabilities of the products, demonstrating tangible business value to prospective customers.
• Strategic Customer Engagement: Actively engage with customers at various levels, cultivating strong and lasting relationships through impactful executive briefings, passionate product evangelism initiatives, and thorough requirements gathering sessions to deeply understand their evolving needs and challenges.

Your Experience

• Minimum 15+ years in product management or technical expertise in the network management space required
• Drive to own full product lifecycle, designing new, innovative, and disruptive products with a customer-centric approach
• Technical Expertise:
• Strong understanding of SD-WAN, Switching, Wireless, distributed networks, Telecom networks, Cloud and Multi-cloud environments.
• Proficiency in L3 and L2 protocols, including OSPF, BGP, Multicast, LACP, BFD, LLDP, ECMP, VLAN, STP, EVPN, and VXLAN.
• Solid knowledge of networking architectures: single and multi-data center, spine-leaf, private and public cloud, and virtualization technologies.
• Familiarity with high availability and redundancy concepts, including HA architectures and disaster recovery planning.
• Experience working with a cross-functional, cross-geographical team
• Excellent presentation, written and verbal communication skills
• Comfortable in an agile environment of rapid iteration, facilitating collaborative work sessions with multi-disciplinary teams
• Demonstrate attention to detail and the ability to comprehend complex product requirements
• Excellent people skills, team mentality
• Demonstrable track record of success

• BS/MS or BS/MBA or equivalent experience required

Palo Alto Networks offers a portfolio of services to assist you with the implementation of your next-generation firewall for prevention and detection of today’s most sophisticated cyber attacks. Support, Consulting and Education services are available to help you get the maximum protection and value out of
your investment and in a range of options designed to fit your specific requirements, regardless of size or project complexity.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.

Your Impact

• Designing, developing, and maintaining detection rules to protect against attacks and ensure cloud security compliance.
• Conducting research on emerging cloud services and potential misconfigurations from a security perspective.
• Investigating cloud attack techniques, tactics, and identifying detection methods and mapping them to security frameworks and compliance standards.
• Proposing and implementing security detection rules to enhance our defense mechanisms.
• Actively contributing to ongoing process enhancements in security content development, automation, and deployment practices.
• Engaging in public outreach forums to advocate for best practices and represent our company's commitment to excellence.
• Bonus - Establishing industry thought leadership by publishing insightful blogs on security research.

Your Experience

• Ideal - 5+ years of experience in the security compliance and threat research domain.
• Must have - At least 2 years of hands-on experience in public cloud security and compliance (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Must have - Strong command-line skills and troubleshooting experience in Linux environments.
• Highly desirable - Proficiency in Python programming and knowledge of GenAI/LLM based automations.
• Highly desirable - Familiarity with Git version control, CI/CD pipelines, bug tracking tools, etc.
• Highly desirable - Experience with BigQuery, SQL, JSON, REST APIs, Terraform, and similar technologies.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.

Your Career

We're hiring a Principal AI Engineer to lead the technical vision, architecture, and hands-on development of next-generation autonomous AI Agents for our CX and GTM workflows.In this role, you'll build goal-driven agents capable of reasoning, planning, learning, and self-directed execution across complex enterprise environments.

As both a deep technical leader and strategic thinker, you'll shape our company-wide agentic AI strategy, define the product roadmap, and establish best practices in close partnership with CX/GTM domain experts, software engineering, data science, and executive leadership.

Your Impact

• Lead the design and implementation of AI agents capable of planning, multi-step execution, self-correction, and collaboration with humans or other agents.

• Define the architectural blueprint for scalable AI/ML and agentic systems aligned with the enterprise GenAI strategy.

• Build, fine-tune, and adapt LLMs, multimodal models, and specialized agent models.

• Lead end to end Design , implementation and integration of traditional AI/ML systems (eg data science/statistical models) into agentic workflows.

• Create advanced reasoning pipelines, retrieval systems, and knowledge-graph integrations to enable autonomous task execution.

• Ensure production readiness through rigorous testing, evaluation frameworks, and real-world performance validation.

• Drive the full solution lifecycle—from prototype to production—ensuring scalability, reliability, safety, observability, and high performance across all AI/ML and agentic components.

• Partner with data engineering teams to design high-quality datasets, synthetic data pipelines, and continuous learning feedback loops.

• Mentor and guide data scientists and engineers, establishing AI standards/guidelines for data science and engineering across the organization.

• Communicate complex technical decisions, trade-offs, and recommendations to executives and cross-functional stakeholders.

Your Experience

• Masters/PhD in Computer Science, AI, Data Science or related field.

• 15+ years in data science, software engineering, data engineering, ML or Applied AI experience, including architecting large-scale distributed systems.

• Deep expertise in implementing AI/ML systems using LLMs, RAG, Agent Frameworks (eg LangChain, LangGraph) and and advanced intelligent autonomous systems

• Significant experience building production systems involving, ML Models, LLM inference, fine-tuning, orchestration Multi-step reasoning and planning, Tool/function calling etc.

• Up-to-date with latest LLM model capabilities and their evolution like GPT, Anthropic, Llama models etc.

• Hands-on experience in building supervised, unsupervised and semi-supervised models/solutions.

• Demonstrated ability to lead high-ambiguity cross-team technical initiatives.

• Strong proficiency in SQL to analyse structured data relational data bases.

• Strong proficiency in at least one core language (Python, Go, Java, or equivalent).

• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, microservice architecture and cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP).

• Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence at all levels of the organization.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Job Summary

We are looking for motivated, smart, hardworking and passionate individuals to join the Next-gen Firewall dataplane team. You will be part of a world-class software engineering team that works on various cutting-edge technologies for the firewall. As a member of a data plane networking software group, you will be responsible for designing and developing the next-generation firewall. You will take ownership for large software components, work with product management on real life customer requirements, apply your knowledge to functional design, utilize your programming skills for efficient and robust implementation, and interact with quality assurance and field support teams in the whole software development cycle. The culture at Palo Alto Networks is creative, dynamic and inspiring to tackle real work Cyber-attacks.

Key Responsibilities

• Responsible for development of NextGen Network Security Components and Protocols for State-of-the-art firewalls deployed at Enterprise, Data Center, Cloud, and Service Provider environments
• Lead the development of L2-L4 network security features, including stateful TCP/UDP inspection, across both hardware and virtual platforms
• Develop scalable flow architecture for packet processing pipeline using DPDK for multi-core platforms and interface with ASIC functions
• Develop scalable software solutions for a distributed session architecture spanning across a cluster of firewalls.
• Support critical customer escalations and provide root cause analysis in a timely manner;
• Work with multi-functional team members on feature requirements, including but not limited to Product Management, QA, Support, etc
• Product visionary, ideas on competitive edge, Effective decision maker, take ownership and independently drive, lead tasks and assignments

Your Experience

• 15+ years of relevant experience.
• Expert in common network protocols such as TCP/IP, IPv4, IPv6, multicast
• Expert in dataplane technologies like DPDK based packet processing and performance tuning along with packet Latency / Loss analysis
• Expert in typical network device features like NAT, ALG, DoS Protection
• Strong experience in packet processing, parsing, networking (L2 -L4) protocols/architecture, Layer-2/Layer-3/Layer-4 packet flow.
• Expert in computer architecture, cybersecurity, distributed systems
• Good to have experience in using Broadcom/Marvell chips for switching, QoS and interface management
• In-depth understanding of common software vulnerabilities and mitigations
• In-depth understanding of linux systems
• Expert C, Python, Shell script programming skills
• Tech lead experience in networking domains
• Strong communication skills to work effectively with multi-functional groups
• Strong Experience in C++/JAVA programming and XML/JSON understanding is desirable
• Can-do attitude and ability to take initiative and drive open issues to completion

Preferred Qualifications

• BS/MS degree in Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent experience

We define the industry, instead of waiting for directions. We need individuals who feel comfortable in ambiguity, excited by the prospect of a challenge, and empowered by the unknown risks facing our everyday lives that are only enabled by a secure digital environment.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.

Your Career

You will be responsible for engaging with PANW business leaders and ensuring that we communicate a cohesive strategy and story to analysts who cover these areas of our business. You will be managing high ROI outreach programs focused on strategic engagement and developing long term relationships with the industry analyst community across the globe. You will act as a key strategic advisor to PANW’s business, driving valuable insight, guidance and feedback back into the business to help inform strategy, business and marketing decisions. You will manage the accuracy of PANW position in key analyst research reports.

Your Impact

• Act as a strategic adviser to the business, driving valuable insight, guidance and feedback back into the business

• Form strong relationships with cybersecurity analysts as well as those with broader influence

• Work closely with key internal and external stakeholders to design and deliver programs that maximize influencer and customer awareness, consideration and recommendation of strategy, products and services globally

• Influence the creation, definition, and inclusion in new markets

• Manage analyst evaluation research cycles to drive accurate representation of corporate strategy and vision in the market

Your Experience

• 8+ years in Analyst Relations - preferably in Cybersecurity, but not required

• Deep experience in managing analyst evaluative reports

• Hands-on approach, ability to execute swiftly

• Impeccable executive presence and strong influencing skills

• Strategic thinking and problem-solving skills

• A team player that brings creativity to our collaborative culture

• Experience managing cross-functional teams in a fast-paced environment and the ability to manage multiple projects and priorities

• Strong analytical ability to assess research relevance

• Understanding and affinity for technology and a motivation to learn product details

• Strong work ethic, integrity and organizational skills

You will be a key member of the Global Analyst Relations Team, alongside peers aligned to the priorities of Palo Alto Networks, and reporting into the Senior Director of Global Analyst Relations. You will work closely with key internal and external stakeholders to develop and deliver programs that maximize influencer and customer awareness, consideration and recommendation of Palo Alto Networks strategy globally across our portfolio.

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) is expected to be between $148,000 - $241,000/YR. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found .

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.