Principal Researcher

Palo Alto Networks • Santa Clara, CA

9d • $162,700 - $263,150 • Remote

About The Position

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

Requirements

• 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.
• 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.

Nice To Haves

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

Responsibilities

• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees