Palo Alto Director Data Science 

United States, California 

114203366

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

Your Career

As a Senior Staff PSIRT Engineer, you will play a critical role in protecting Palo Alto Networks products and services by leading complex vulnerability investigations and response efforts from start to finish. You will serve as a senior technical expert in the Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT), driving deep technical analysis, root cause determination, and remediation guidance for product security issues.

Your Impact

• Lead the technical investigation of reported security vulnerabilities in products and cloud offerings, including reproduction, impact analysis, and severity scoring (e.g., CVSS).
• Drive root cause analysis and partner with product engineering teams to develop, validate, and verify remediations.
• Collaborate closely with product, engineering, legal, privacy, support, sales, and threat intelligence teams to ensure aligned vulnerability handling and response strategies.
• Engage directly with customers, security researchers, and industry partners to discuss vulnerability details, mitigation steps, and disclosure timelines.
• Maintain deep familiarity with industry vulnerability handling standards and organizations such as CNA, NIST, FIRST, and OpenSSF.
• Contribute to the continuous improvement of PSIRT workflows, automation, and tooling to accelerate vulnerability detection, analysis, and remediation.
• Mentor junior engineers in vulnerability research, triage, and incident response methodologies.
• Produce high-quality technical documentation, incident reports, and executive summaries for both internal and external audiences.
• Stay up-to-date on emerging threats, exploitation techniques, and security research trends to proactively strengthen product security posture.

Your Experience

• 4+ years in product security, application security, vulnerability research, or related fields, with significant hands-on experience in vulnerability investigation and exploitation analysis.
• Strong expertise in reverse engineering, debugging, and secure software development practices.
• Demonstrated ability to reproduce, analyze, and assess the exploitability of complex vulnerabilities in large-scale systems or cloud environments.
• Deep familiarity with CVSS, CVE, and public vulnerability databases.
• Experience handling responsible disclosure and coordinating with external researchers and industry partners.
• Practical knowledge of secure coding guidelines, memory corruption mitigation, and common vulnerability classes (e.g., buffer overflows, SQLi, XSS, deserialization).
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to clearly articulate technical risk to diverse audiences.
• Experience working in fast-paced environments with strict SLAs for vulnerability response.

Education

• BS or MS Degree in Engineering or Computer Science, related to computer security, application security, information security, network security, or cryptography.

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 $146,000- $237,500/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.