Principal Security Researcher – AI (Cybersecurity LLM Post-Training, Evals, and Environments)
Palo Alto Networks · Posted Sep 3, 2026
- Santa Clara, United States
- Principal
- $163K–$264K per year
- Visa sponsorship
Lead AI research to advance cybersecurity capabilities of large language models and autonomous AI agents through post‑training, evaluation, and environment design.
Compensation
$163,200.00 - $264,000.00/yr
Responsibilities
- Develop high‑quality security data, realistic training and evaluation environments, reliable graders, and post‑training methods for complex cybersecurity tasks spanning vulnerability research, threat analysis, detection, investigation, remediation, secure coding, and autonomous security workflows.
- Design reproducible training and evaluation environments for complex cybersecurity tasks.
- Transform source‑code repositories, vulnerabilities, security incidents, malware samples, threat intelligence, detection logic, patches, test harnesses, and security tools into structured tasks for LLMs and AI agents.
- Build reliable graders, verifiers, and reward signals using tests, compilation, runtime behavior, security‑tool outputs, detection results, vulnerability reproduction, and other domain‑specific validation methods.
- Design evaluations for security reasoning, code understanding, threat analysis, root‑cause analysis, tool use, long‑horizon execution, and autonomous task completion.
Requirements
- BS/MS degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.