Sr Staff Researcher (Agentic AI Systems Security Prisma AIRS)

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

Prisma AIRS AI Supply Chain Security owns the full supply-chain security posture for agentic-AI systems at Palo Alto Networks covering the models artifacts tools and extensions that enterprise AI applications are built on. We turn threat research into the scanning and detection capabilities that let customers adopt agentic AI without inheriting its supply-chain risk.

We are looking for a security engineer to lead threat research and detection strategy for agentic AI systems in a hands-on role split across research and engineering. You will model the threat surface across the full agentic stack agents skills MCP servers and traditional model artifacts including their configurations and deployment architecture for both proprietary hosted models and in-house custom deployments then build that research into production scanning capabilities and own the services that ship them.

You bring systemic fluency in the agentic threat landscape: direct and indirect (cross-domain) prompt injection jailbreak and guardrail bypass instruction-hierarchy violations and the agent-loop failures they enable excessive agency goal drift and memory or RAG poisoning. That extends into the tool and extension layer: MCP tool poisoning tool shadowing server rug pulls OAuth scope and token-passthrough abuse and supply-chain risk in third-party skills and plugins. Deployment posture matters equally exposed inference endpoints least-privilege tool scoping and ephemeral credentials insecure output handling and egress control over the channels that turn a single injection into data production you run the pipeline itself: service health latency and availability targets release quality and false-positive/false-negative regression gates with on-call response and observability as day-to-day work.

Qualifications

• Shape detection and scanning strategy by identifying the vulnerability exploit and attack-technique areas in the agentic-AI domain where new or improved protections are needed.

• Drive innovative detection ideas from concept to production delivering measurable improvements in coverage quality speed or scalability.

• Expand the teams ability to deliver protections at scale through practical automation detection pipeline improvements and AI-assisted research workflows.

• Provide hands-on technical leadership to researchers and developers through direction review problem decomposition and execution guidance.

• Influence cross-functional decisions with product QA engineering and research partners to ensure detections are technically sound customer-relevant and production-ready.

• Support the operational excellence of the detection pipeline and other common infrastructure owned by the team.
  

• Deep hands-on experience in vulnerability research exploit analysis offensive security or closely related threat prevention work.

• Deep and proven expertise using agentic-AI systems with an eye for finding loopholes across both proprietary hosted models and in-house custom model deployments. Using agentic-AI practices as tooling and automation to improve security analysis detection development validation or response workflows is highly desirable.

• Proven ability to identify important technical problems propose detection ideas drive execution and deliver measurable product or customer impact specifically in the agentic-AI threat research domain.

• Deep understanding of common vulnerability classes and exploit techniques - including memory corruption injection authentication bypass path traversal SSRF RCE XSS SQL injection CSRF MITM and DoS - and how these classes resurface through agent tool wrappers tool parameters and insecurely handled model output.

• Strong ability to analyze vulnerability root cause exploitability PoC behavior network traffic protocol behavior application-layer attack patterns and detection tradeoffs.

• Experience translating vulnerability or exploit understanding into production-quality scanning capabilities or other customer-facing protections.

• Strong programming or scripting skills for research automation tooling test generation detection development or pipeline improvements.

• Ability to lead complex technical work under ambiguity guide other researchers or developers and make sound technical decisions under time pressure.

• Strong communication skills with the ability to influence technical direction across research product QA and engineering partners.

• BS/MS in Computer Science Computer Engineering Cybersecurity or related field or equivalent professional experience.

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.

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.