Sr Staff Machine Learning Engineer (DLP)

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks® everything starts and ends with our mission:

Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.
Our vision is a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. We are a company built on the foundation of challenging and disrupting the way things are done, and we’re looking for innovators who are as committed to shaping the future of cybersecurity as we are.

Who We Are

We take our mission of protecting the digital way of life seriously. We are relentless in protecting our customers and we believe that the unique ideas of every member of our team contributes to our collective success. Our values were crowdsourced by employees and are brought to life through each of us everyday - from disruptive innovation and collaboration, to execution. From showing up for each other with integrity to creating an environment where we all feel included.

As a member of our team, you will be shaping the future of cybersecurity. We work fast, value ongoing learning, and we respect each employee as a unique individual. Knowing we all have different needs, our development and personal wellbeing programs are designed to give you choice in how you are supported. This includes our FLEXBenefits wellbeing spending account with over 1,000 eligible items selected by employees, our mental and financial health resources, and our personalized learning opportunities - just to name a few!

At Palo Alto Networks, we believe in the power of collaboration and value in-person interactions. This is why our employees generally work full time from our office with flexibility offered where needed. This setup fosters casual conversations, problem-solving, and trusted relationships. Our goal is to create an environment where we all win with precision.

Your Career

We are looking for an exceptionally talented Machine Learning Engineer to be part of a fast paced team that uses Machine Learning to build innovative products for organizations to easily discover, classify, and protect highly sensitive data across SaaS applications. Our team finds solutions to hard problems, is innovative in finding data, builds models, and puts them into production. We produce several patents every year.

This role is located at our Santa Clara, California headquarters campus.

We expect office-based employees to be in the office four days per week, with one day working from where they choose. We believe being together facilitates casual conversations and those magic moments where we can work on issues and ideas informally. These moments build capability and deepen trusted relationships and allow our people to feel safe in taking risks and being disruptive. Like so many companies, we are working through the details and things could change …. but in general if a role is deemed office-based we want our teams to be together four days per week.

Your Impact

• Develop AI-driven solutions: Apply state-of-the-art machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and deep learning techniques including LLMs to analyze vast structured and unstructured datasets, classify documents, extract insights, and detect nuanced patterns.
• Enhance AI accuracy & reliability: Leverage the latest advances in deep learning and NLP to build scalable models that optimize precision, minimize false positives/negatives, and improve the overall product experience.
• Lead end-to-end ML implementation: Architect and own machine learning pipelines, optimizing for scalability, efficiency, and maintainability while ensuring seamless integration with production systems.
• Drive ML innovation & best practices: Act as a technical leader, championing ML best practices, experimentation, and deployment strategies across teams.
• Identify high-impact opportunities: Discover novel ways to apply AI/ML for solving complex data security and privacy challenges, shaping a high-value roadmap that scales impact for customers.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams: Partner with Product, Engineering, and Business teams to align ML advancements with strategic goals, driving innovation in Data Security and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions.

Your Experience 

• MS / PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field, or equivalent military experience.
• 5+ years of industry/academic experience in software development, with a minimum of 2 years as a machine learning engineer, data scientist, or LLM specialist.
• Strong programming skills with experience in distributed cloud systems (GCP, AWS, Azure) and containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.
• Proven ability to solve real-world problems using machine learning, deep learning, and generative AI techniques.
• Experience with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow), NLP models (transformers, BERT, GPT), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and Large Language Models (LLMs).
• Proficiency in ML algorithms such as XGBoost, CatBoost, CNNs, LSTMs, and NLP frameworks like spaCy, Gensim, NLTK, and tokenization techniques (Byte Pair Encoding, WordPiece, SentencePiece, etc.).
• Strong understanding of ML Ops, model evaluation, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and deployment best practices.
• Hands-on experience building and optimizing LLM-powered applications, vector search systems, and multimodal AI solutions.
• A “get stuff done” attitude, thriving in a fast-paced, collaborative environment while leading cutting-edge AI initiatives.
• Passion for security and AI-driven threat detection, with prior experience in NLP, cybersecurity, or data protection products a plus.

The Team

Our engineering team is at the core of our products and connected directly to the mission of preventing cyberattacks. We are constantly innovating — challenging the way we, and the industry, think about cybersecurity. Our engineers don’t shy away from building products to solve the problems no one has pursued before. 

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.

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 $160 - $190/YR. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found here.

Our Commitment

We’re problem solvers that take risks and challenge cybersecurity’s status quo. It’s simple: we can’t 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  [email protected].

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.

Is role eligible for Immigration Sponsorship?: Yes