Palo Alto Networks · 1 day ago
Principal Researcher (Unit 42)
United States
Full-time
Remote
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$163K/yr - $263K/yr
7+ years expPalo Alto Networks is dedicated to protecting our digital way of life through innovation and impactful technology. The Principal Threat Intelligence Researcher will be responsible for delivering actionable threat insights to clients, enhancing their cybersecurity capabilities, and collaborating with internal teams to develop tailored intelligence solutions.
Agentic AICloud SecurityCyber SecurityNetwork SecuritySecurity
Responsibilities
The incumbent will play a critical role in understanding our customers intelligence needs and developing tailored intelligence that augment their existing capabilities
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Qualification
Required
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
Demonstrated ability to coordinate with cross-organizational threat analysts, facilitating collaboration, and aligning efforts to achieve common goals
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
Preferred
Deep experience with cyber threat intelligence frameworks and analytical techniques preferred
Experience presenting at CTI or cyber threat research conferences preferred
Benefits
Restricted stock units
Bonus
Company
Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks is a cybersecurity company that offers cybersecurity solutions for organizations.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
Palo Alto Networks has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (579)
2024 (482)
2023 (341)
2022 (452)
2021 (493)
2020 (235)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$65MKey Investors
Icon VenturesLehman HoldingsGlobespan Capital Partners
2012-07-20IPO
2008-11-03Series C· $10M
2008-08-18Series C· $27M
Leadership Team
Helmut Reisinger
CEO EMEA
Nikesh Arora
Chairman CEO
Recent News
2026-01-14
2026-01-13
Jerusalem Post
2026-01-11
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