Security Research Manager Investigation Algorithms (Cortex)

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks were united by a shared missionto 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 youre ready to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who are just as passionate as you are youre 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!

Job Summary

Lead and grow the team in charge of researching and developing Autopilot an innovative product for graph-based fully-autonomous investigation and response (Over the Cortex platform).

As the manager of the Autopilot team youll lead a team of security researchers set the projects technical vision and standards and own its success.

You will lead an innovative team on the research design and development of a new graph-oriented security product. Creating investigation modules that allow Autopilot to autonomously detect investigate and respond to advanced threats at a massive scale.

Youll work closely with other development and product teams to turn a successful POC into a full-fledged product staying agile in a dynamic environment and using data-driven empirical research to determine and drive the project in the best direction.

Youll analyze everything from new malware behaviors to attacker techniques and process activity in enterprise-scale networks using data collected from across millions of endpoints. Your work will span identifying attack patterns and uncovering statistical anomalies as well as validating that the system responds effectively to real-world attacks and APT campaigns using production data.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of security researchers providing mentorship guidance and continuous feedback to help them grow their careers (Manage the team develop the people).

• Drive the research strategy and execution for new autonomous methods for investigating and responding to targeted attackers leveraging large-scale XDR data and graph-based algorithms.

• Ensure collaboration with engineering product and other research teams acting as a key interface to push the project forward and align on cross-functional goals.

• Direct the teams work on deep hands-on investigations of real incidents to reinforce the best investigation and response approach leveraging a combination of os-internals TTPs semi-labeled data and large-scale statistical methods.

• Foster a disruptive environment that innovates using advanced techniques such as graph algorithms machine learning and LLM agents to mimic and scale human security analyst workflows.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• Experience managing a technical research or R&D team.

• 5 years of experience in security or threat research with a proven track record of delivering actionable insights and real-world impact.

• Experience driving projects from concept to execution with a strong sense of ownership.

• Intimate knowledge and understanding of attack methods and techniques (TTPs) over endpoints and enterprise networks.

• Technical proficiency in Python including experience providing code reviews for team members and adhering to best practices.

• Ability to work with and extract meaningful insights from large-scale datasets including strong foundational knowledge of basic statistics.

• Excellent people management verbal and written communication skills with a proven ability to collaborate across organizational boundaries.

Preferred Qualifications

• In-depth knowledge of the inner workings of operating systems (especially Windows internals).

• Experience in designing and implementing behavioral detection/investigation systems.

• Experience working with graph DB and algorithms

• Advanced background in statistics data studies or machine learning

Our Commitment

Were trailblazers that dream big 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.