Director Data Science jobs at Palo Alto

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

Your Career

As the, you will be the, including full-time employees and/or assigned personnel. You will be responsible for driving leadership over the professional services business and providing strategic and operational oversight to the Senior Managers and regional delivery leaders who report to this role. You will be instrumental in defining thenecessary to scale technical services delivery across key U.S. Federal, State, and Local accounts. This role is highly integrated with the Service Sales, Product Sales, and other Support teams, focusing on building strong, trusted customer relationships and ensuring successful outcomes.

Your Impact

• Set the strategic vision and direction for all post-sales technical service delivery in the US Public Sector, ensuring consistent and high-quality execution for Palo Alto Networks’ NetSec Products.

• Act as the single point of accountability for technical services, interfacing with GCS, Sales, Product, Engineering, and Partner teams to ensure alignment and delivery of business outcomes.

• Serve as the Executive Sponsor for strategic US Public Sector accounts, engaging with executive-level customer stakeholders (e.g., CIOs, CISOs) to provide value reviews and resolve high-stakes escalated issues.

• Build and develop a high-performing team of technical professionals through hiring the best talent in the industry, mentoring/coaching, and performance management in line with the defined capability requirements for the team.

• Drive and achieve the following business and operational objectives:

  • Maintain consistently high utilization of PS consultants through optimal planning and backlog management.

  • Design and maintain the best resource mix across FTEs and contractors, maximizing quality and agility.

  • Reduce Time to Value (TTV) by accelerating deployment and adoption timelines.

  • Contribute to Service Sales Growth by enabling scalable, value-driven technical offerings.

  • Achieve global target service margin ratios through delivery efficiency and cost control.

  • Build and sustain strong, strategic relationships with subcontractors and delivery partners.

  • Ensure high levels of customer satisfaction (CSAT) through proactive support and continuous improvement.

• Drive continuous improvement across the delivery of Netsec Professional Services and Customer Success Engineering, through the use of Automation and AI to drive efficiency, quality, and scale.

• Standardize and continuously optimize the NetSec operating rhythm and delivery practices to improve service health.

• Represent US Public Sector region at a global level, sharing customer insights, local challenges, and opportunities for regional impact.

• A significant portion of your impact is external: collaborating with the sales leadership team, product, portfolio, and support teams, where you will act as the Professional Services liaison to enable client success. You will build strong customer relationships and be the point of contact for successfully handling customer escalations to maintain high customer satisfaction.

Your Experience

• 10+ years of experience in technical services, professional services, customer success, support or related functions within a high-growth SaaS/cloud enterprise environment.
• 5+ years of experience in a leadership role managing regional teams, including direct and matrixed reporting lines.
• Demonstrated success in managing performance against KPIs related to deployment, adoption, margin, utilization, and CSAT.
• Strong foundational understanding of Internet security concepts and products, with a demonstrated knowledge of NGFW and SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) architecture and its components.
• Demonstrated experience running a profitable Professional Services or Customer Success business , including achieving revenue/margin targets, managing backlog, health and optimizing project closure rates.

• Skilled in key business systems, including:

  • Experience with Professional Services Automation (PSA) tools (e.g., Clarizen, Certina, Kantata) for tracking metrics like utilization, time-off, and backlog.
  • Experience with Sales Management tools (e.g., Salesforce) for revenue forecasting and pipeline review.
  • Experience with Business Intelligence (BI) tools (e.g., Tableau) for reporting on key operational metrics.
• Demonstrated ability to manage critical customer escalations effectively and ensure prompt resolution for high-profile clients.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to clearly articulate complex technical knowledge to non-technical individuals and leadership.
• Undergraduate degree in a related field (CS, IS, EE, CE, IT, etc.) or commensurate experience.
• US Government DoD Active Top Secret Clearance or higher.
• Relevant industry certifications such as CISSP and/or PMP are highly desirable.
• Background in cybersecurity or enterprise IT preferred.
• Ability to travel up to 25%+ domestically to customer sites and internal business meetings.

As threats and technology evolve, we stay in step to accomplish our mission. You’ll be involved in implementing new products, transitioning from old products to new, and fixing integrations and critical issues as they are raised. But you won’t wait for them to be raised, you’ll seek them out, too. We fix and identify technical problems with a pointed focus of providing the best customer support in the industry.

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/commissioned roles) is expected to be between $230000 - $268000/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.

Key Responsibilities

As a Distinguished Engineer, you will own the long-term technical direction and execution for all data and analytics infrastructure within Saas Data Security and AI.

I. Architecture & Strategic Vision

• Define Architectural Roadmap : Set the 3-5 year technical strategy and architectural vision for the Enterprise DLP data platform, emphasizing scalability, performance, security, and cost-efficiency
• Big Data & AI Foundation : Drive the design, implementation, scaling, and evangelism of the core BigQuery, Vertex AI, Nvidia Triton, Kubeflow platform components that enable high-velocity data ingestion, transformation, and Machine Learning model serving for DLP detections
• Real-time Decisioning: Architect and implement ultra-low latency data ingestion and processing systems (utilizing Kafka, Pub/Sub, Dataflow) to enable real-time DLP policy enforcement and alert generation at massive enterprise scale
• Cross-Functional Influence : Act as the technical voice of the DLP data platform, collaborating with Engineering VPs, Product Management, and Data Science teams to align platform capabilities with product innovation

II. High-Scale Data Platform Engineering

• Big Data Pipeline Mastery : Architect and Lead the design and implementation of highly resilient, optimized batch and real-time data pipelines (ETL/ELT) to transform raw data streams into high-quality, actionable datasets
• Optimized Dataset s: Expertly design and optimize clean, well-structured analytical datasets within BigQuery, focusing on partitioning, clustering, and schema evolution to maximize query performance for both operational analytics and complex data science/ML feature generation
• Database Strategy: Provide deep, hands-on expertise in both SQL and NoSQL databases like MongoDB, Spanner, BigQuery, advising on the optimal data persistence layer for diverse DLP data use cases (e.g., policy configurations, high-speed telemetry, analytical fact tables)
• MLOps Implementation : Establish robust MLOps practices model deployment & execution pipelines like Vertex AI, Nvidia Triton for DLP models, including automated pipelines for continuous training, versioning, deployment, and monitoring of model drift
• Performance Engineering : Debug, optimize, and tune the most challenging performance bottlenecks across the entire data platform, from initial data ingestion to final analytics query execution, often dealing with PBs of data

III. Mentorship & Operational Excellence

• Technical Mentorship : Mentor and develop Principal and Staff-level engineers, raising the bar for engineering craftsmanship and data platform development across the organization
• Operational Health : Define and implement advanced observability, monitoring, and alerting strategies to ensure the end-to-end health and SLOs of the mission-critical DLP data service

Preferred Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in a high-scale data-intensive environment, with a minimum of 3+ years operating as a Distinguished or Principal-level Engineer/Architect
• Mastery of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with extensive, hands-on experience architecting and scaling solutions using BigQuery and Vertex AI or equivalent AWS, Azure, or other Big Data & AI services
• Expertise in Big Data processing frameworks and managed services, specifically with building and scaling data and analytics pipelines using Dataflow, Pub/Sub, and GKE (or equivalent technologies like Apache Spark/Kafka)
• Strong experience in SQL & NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB, Cassandra, Spanner), with an understanding of their respective architectural trade-offs for distributed systems
• Demonstrated ability to design scalable data models and systems that enable high-precision
• Proven ability to build and optimize clean, well-structured analytical datasets for large-scale business and data science use cases
• Demonstrated experience in implementing and supporting Big Data solutions for both batch (scheduled) and real-time (streaming) analytics
• Prior experience in the security domain (especially DLP, Data Security, or Cloud Security) is a significant advantage
• Exceptional ability to influence technical and business leaders, translating ambiguous problems into clear, executable technical designs
• BS/MS in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering or equivalent experience or equivalent military experience required

Salary 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/commissioned roles) is expected to be between $230,000/YR - $300,000/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.

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

Your Impact

• Define and drive the product vision, strategy and roadmap for our Data Security product line

• Conduct market research, competitive analysis and customer feedback to inform product decisions

• Collaborate with design and engineering teams to develop product prototypes and interfaces

• Work closely with data scientists and ML engineers to develop and integrate ML algorithms into the Data Security product lines

• Create and maintain product documentation, including user guides, training materials and release notes

• Monitor product performance and customer feedback to inform product improvements and updates

• Work across functional agile teams (Engineering, UX, customer support, operations, finance, sales and marketing)

• Identify technology partners and drive integration into market leading product

• Drive joint sales (SKUs, solution bundles, incentives) and marketing (collaterals, webinars, trade shows) models with cross-functional teams within and partners

Your Experience

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field

• MBA is desirable

• 3 years in product management

• Strong understanding of network security principles and solutions

• Client-facing experience through previous product work or customer success roles

• Strong technical background with experience working with data scientists and ML engineers

• Strong understanding of user experience design principles and methodologies

• Excellent communications and collaboration skills, with experience working with cross-functional teams

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with experience using data to inform product decisions

• Experience working in an Agile development environment

• Experience launching cloud products and services

• Demonstrable track record of success

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/commissioned roles) is expected to be between $148,700 - $240,525/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.

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

Your Impact

• Partner with Sales, Legal, FP&A, and Sales Operations on non-standard contract reviews to determine revenue impact and provide recommendations to maximize revenue and other key financial metrics

• Support monthly closing activities including, but not limited to, reviewing non-routine revenue transactions, performing accounting assessments, preparing accurate journal entries, and documenting revenue conclusions

• Monitor revenue inbox to respond timely and appropriately to business requests

• Research, resolve, and operationalize complex and non-routine revenue accounting transactions

• Identify actionable insights and suggest recommendations to address issues and improve accounting processes/efficiencies

• Create accounting policy for new product introductions in partnership with the Product and IT organizations

• Participate in and/or lead projects and initiatives with cross functional impacts

• Ensure compliance with SOX 404 key controls

• Assist with external audits and special projects as needed

Your Experience

• Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting, Finance, or related field or equivalent military experience

• Minimum of 8+ years of related work experience with 6+ years of Technical Revenue experience

• Prior Public Accounting experience with regards to Revenue (ASC 606) preferred

• CPA or equivalent a plus

• SAP, SFDC, Big Query and accounting operations experience a plus

• Advanced knowledge of Microsoft Office (Excel and PowerPoint) and Google Sheets

• Experienced in writing complex technical revenue accounting position papers

• Solid organizational skills with the ability to manage priorities and execute in a fast-paced environment with attention to details

• Team player and effective communicator with all levels of management and cross functional organizations.

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/commissioned roles) is expected to be between $192000 - $264500/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.

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

Your Impact

• Own the entire product lifecycle, with proven experience taking an IT product from Zero to One.

• Define and champion the holistic vision, strategy, and roadmap for a suite of IT products for opportunity management, account planning, pipeline visibility, and seller coaching

• Enable sales leaders with powerful forecasting tools, scenario modeling, and performance dashboards that convert data into decisions.

• Build a cohesive and intelligent seller workspace that serves as a personalized cockpit, surfacing the right accounts, AI driven action plan, and insights at the right time.

• Identify, scope, and drive the embedding of AI solutions into the core sales journey to automate tasks, provide intelligent guidance, and optimize decision-making.

• Maintain a working knowledge of cutting-edge AI and Machine Learning technologies and their practical application in sales cycles

• Demonstrate exceptional strength in Stakeholder Management, effectively communicating product vision, trade-offs, and progress to executive leadership

• Provide strategic leadership and guidance to a team of Product Managers and Business Analysts, overseeing the definition of detailed product requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria, fostering a culture of creativity, accountability, and collaboration.

• Work closely with Engineering, UX/UI, and QA teams in an Agile environment to ensure timely and high-quality delivery.

Your Experience

• 15+ years of experience in Enterprise IT with 5+ years of experience in sales domain

• Proven success building products from the ground up and scaling them across global sales teams.

• 5+ years of leadership experience, managing and mentoring senior-level product managers.

• Deep product expertise in CRM platforms and Forecasting platforms in B2B Sales.

• Fluency in modern UX principles — with a passion for designing clean, guided experiences that reduce cognitive load for sellers.

• Experience applying AI/ML to enhance sales intelligence, automate workflows, and personalize seller journeys.

• Exceptional storytelling and stakeholder influence skills — you know how to build alignment and drive urgency.

• Passion for measuring what matters — defining KPIs tied to seller adoption, velocity, and revenue outcomes.

• Preferred:

• Experience with specific AI applications in the B2B context, such as predictive next best action, intelligent content recommendation, sales forecasting, co-pilot interfaces or conversational AI for Sellers.

• Familiarity with cloud-based ML platforms

• Demonstrated ability to partner with geographically distributed teams and external vendors to deliver impactful and scalable solutions

• A proactive self-starter who excels in fast-paced, high-growth environments

• The ideal candidate will have experience leading large-scale transformations in seller enablement or digital sales productivity.

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/commissioned roles) is expected to be between $169000 - $282500/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.

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

Your Career

This is a role for a leader who brings clarity to complexity, elevates teams, and navigates change with confidence. You’ll set the tone for delivery excellence across the region while contributing directly to global strategy.

Leadership & Customer Strategy

• Lead all Technical Services delivery across NAM, ensuring consistent, high-quality execution
• Align with GCS, Sales, Product, Engineering, and Partner teams to drive customer and business outcomes
• Support Area Leaders in CIO/CISO-level engagements, value reviews, and high-visibility escalations
• Represent NAM in global forums, advocating for customer insights and regional needs

People & Team Development

• Build, develop, and mentor a high-performing technical organization
• Create a culture grounded in accountability, continuous learning, and operational excellence
• Coach teams through complex customer situations, rapid change, and new delivery models
• Foster a culture of people performance management and accountability

Operational & Business Outcomes

• Maintain strong utilization, backlog health, and delivery predictability
• Optimize resource mix across FTEs and contractors to maximize agility and cost efficiency
• Reduce Time to Value and Time to Deploy by strengthening deployment and adoption practices
• Contribute to service sales growth through scalable, outcome-driven offerings
• Sustain strong relationships with subcontractors and partners to support delivery at scale
• Meet global margin targets through efficient, high-quality execution

Innovation & Delivery Excellence

• Advance automation and AI across Cloud & Cortex professional services and customer success engineering to improve scale and consistency
• Standardize delivery practices, proactively identify risks, and drive data-backed decisions across areas to improve service health
• Ensure effective execution of global and theatre-level programs, adapting them for NAM where needed

Your Experience

• 10+ years in technical services, professional services, customer success, support, or similar roles in a high-growth SaaS/cloud environment
• 5+ years leading regional or multi-regional teams with direct and matrixed reporting lines
• Strong track record of delivering against KPIs including deployment speed, adoption, margin, utilization, and CSAT
• Deep familiarity with Cloud, Endpoint, SOAR, SIEM, and SOC environments; experience with industry leading security platforms strongly preferred
• Experience supporting cyber security programs for large US Federal Government customers
• Experience with supporting operational security requirements or enterprise governance, risk, and compliance initiatives
• Experience engaging with and presenting to executive stakeholders across Product Management, Services Product Management, Sales, and PS/CS organizations
• Experience leading large scale teams exceeding 100+ FTEs and Contractor staff
• Strong communicator who can influence across technical and non-technical teams
• Skilled at building trust, developing talent, and guiding teams through ambiguity
• Balanced, thoughtful decision-maker in escalation and complex customer situations
• Highly collaborative, with a track record of driving alignment and continuous improvement
• Industry recognized security credentials, e.g. CISSP, CRISC
• Bachelor’s degree required; Master’s/MBA preferred; equivalent military experience considered
• Willingness to travel 20–30% within NAM and occasionally globally

As threats and technology evolve, we stay in step to accomplish our mission. You’ll be involved in implementing new products, transitioning from old products to new, and fixing integrations and critical issues as they are raised. But you won’t wait for them to be raised, you’ll seek them out, too. We fix and identify technical problems with a pointed focus of providing the best customer support in the industry.

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/commissioned roles) is expected to be between $270,000-315,000/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.

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

Your Career

Palo Alto Networks is building a world-class product management organization and continues to look for top-notch product management talent to expand the team. As the Director of Product Management for Strata Cloud Manager Platform you will be responsible for the foundational aspects of our platform.

To be successful in this position you must possess a combination of strong technical skills, analytical skills, as well as have a passion for driving enterprise networking & security while bridging customer business requirements with key market trends. You must be comfortable with frequent interaction with customers, prospects and industry analysts presenting our solution and explaining our security solution while understanding and articulating their requirements. You have a track record of success in leading focused, tightly-knit product teams, have delivered on product commitments in working closely with engineering leadership, and have successfully developed and articulated your vision, product strategy, and product plans to the company’s leadership.

Your Impact

• Lead the Product Management team for Strata Cloud Manager Platform
• Collaborate with PM leadership to develop your vision, product strategy, product roadmap and technology requirements as part of market and customer requirements
• Work cross functionally with the NGFW, Cloud Delivered Shared Services and SASE teams to deliver on the vision of “platformization” strategy
• Develop, manage & communicate product roadmap to customers, prospects and all key internal stakeholders
• Collaborate with engineering to solve problems and deliver high-quality products
• Engage with the product marketing team and help them develop compelling messaging, impactful sales tools and marketing content to support sales and field marketing teams
• Work with NPI, certification, professional services, support, education team and ensure your products get coverage by these cross-functional teams
• Drive product pricing and go-to-market decisions

Your Experience

• BS/MS or equivalent experience or equivalent military experience required
• Strong desire to take ownership of the full product lifecycle
• 8+ years in product management with at least 3 years in a lead/management role
• Must have product management experience in two or more areas: enterprise, cloud, network security, platform
• Very strong (written and verbal) communication and presentation skills
• Strong interpersonal skills leading and contributing to cross-functional teams
• Experience in fast-paced environments with overlapping projects/deliverables
• Proven track record in leading focused product management teams
• Proven analytical and problem-solving skills required

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/commissioned roles) is expected to be between $238,000 - $327,000/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.