Principal Researcher (Unit 42)

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

This role is remote, but distance is no barrier to impact. Our hybrid teams collaborate across geographies to solve big problems, stay close to our customers, and grow together. You will be part of a culture that values trust, accountability, and shared success where your work truly matters.

Your Career

We are seeking a Principal Threat Intelligence Researcher for our Unit 42 Intelligence Response Unit’s CTI Services Delivery Team. This team plays a critical role in creating timely, relevant, and actionable threat insights to drive business and security outcomes for our customers. The incumbent will play a critical role in understanding our customers intelligence needs and developing tailored intelligence that augment their existing capabilities. 

Your Impact

The incumbent will play a critical role in understanding our customers intelligence needs and developing tailored intelligence that augment their existing capabilities

As a Principal Threat Intelligence Researcher in the Intel Response Unit, your primary responsibilities will include:

1. Client-facing Briefing: Deliver fused intelligence insights on a recurring basis to clients across industry verticals focusing on relevant cyber threat activities, trends, and shifts in the cyber threat landscape trends. Custom tailored content should empower defensive actions for clients, providing their threat intelligence and security teams with key observations, insights, and perspective. Content creation will require performing independent research across internal data sets, commercial third party data, and open sources. This will also include leveraging existing Unit 42 intelligence publications and working with partners from internal intelligence teams. 

2. Client-facing RFI Support: Provide tailored research and analysis for client-based RFIs to drive business and security outcomes. Leverage the full weight of Palo Alto Network's unique data holdings, on-going research, cross-company capabilities, and externally sourced information. Assist leadership in creating a scalable solution to service multiple industries and similar stakeholder types. Model research findings into Unit 42’s Threat Intelligence Knowledge Repository (TIKR). Provide recommendations  and help implement improvements to service support quality and speed to enhance the effectiveness and differentiation of our threat intelligence services. Some requests will require rapid turn around time, which may include operating outside of normal business hours.

3. Threat Profile Production: Create cyber threat profiles for clients to identify top cyber threat activities, groups, and trends relevant to a client’s unique business operations then provide tailored defensive recommendations. Work with clients to understand their operational footprint, business objectives, technology and security stacks, and areas of risk exposure. Develop MITRE ATT&CK workflows and heatmaps for top threat groups. 

4. Anticipatory Threat Knowledge Creation: Develop structured intelligence insights tracking adversary trends, motivations, organizational priorities, and historical region and industry targeting patterns. This information will act as a backdrop to support intelligence production response for unfolding cyber events, exploitation trends, and threat actor campaigns. Collaborate with other Unit 42 CTI SMEs in fusion cells to expand research and existing collateral on threat groups.

5. Industry Voice & Expertise: Must be willing to represent Unit 42 by delivering expert-level presentations at key conferences, public speaking engagements, podcasts or webinars, and authoring influential thought leadership materials. 

6. Peer Empowerment: Act as a resource for colleagues, sharing expertise and best practices to enhance team capabilities. Provide guidance to grow technical and strategic research acumen through personalized or group brown bag sessions. 

7. Leverage AI for Analytic Workflows: Integrate Generative AI, NotebookLM, and other artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions across all phases of the intelligence lifecycle to improve analytic workflows. Use and develop new AI solutions to reduce research toil, query existing intelligence holdings, and accelerate report and presentation creation.

Your Experience 

• 7 years minimum in the CTI field with experience in threat research, analytic production, and client-facing delivery.

• Strong knowledge of cyber threat actors, noteworthy attacks, and ability to quickly recognize inflection points, signalling shifts, evolution, or deviation from threat activity baselines or industry norms.

• Ability to contextualize cyber events, identify how the events fit into a current or historical pattern, the impact on an industry or organization, and tailored defensive recommendations.

• Experience operating under short fuse deadlines, managing concurrent tasks, and thriving in complex and sometimes ambiguous situations.

• Strong writing and presentation skills with the ability to communicate threat intelligence effectively to diverse audiences, including C-suite level customers.

• Deep experience with cyber threat intelligence frameworks and analytical techniques preferred.

• Demonstrated ability to coordinate with cross-organizational threat analysts, facilitating collaboration, and aligning efforts to achieve common goals.

• Experience presenting at CTI or cyber threat research conferences preferred.

• History of triaging and modeling open source data, telemetry, and other intelligence sources to quickly respond to requests for information. Preference for experience with Synapse or other hypergraphs.

• Experience with prompt engineering and leveraging Google’s AI capabilities to support development of intelligence products.

• Comfortable adapting to change as part of a growing team.

The Team

Unit 42 brings together our world-renowned threat researchers with an elite team of security consultants to create an intelligence-driven, response ready organization. The Unit 42 Threat Intelligence team provides threat research that enables security teams to understand adversary intent and attribution, while enhancing protections offered by our products and services to stop advanced attacks. As threats escalate, Unit 42 is available to advise customers on the latest risks, assess their readiness, and help them recover when the worst occurs.

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 $162700 - $263150/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.