Senior Staff Researcher (Unit 42)

Palo Alto Networks • Santa Clara, CA

7d • Remote

About The Position

As a Senior Designated CTI Analyst (DCA) on the Unit 42 CTI Services Delivery Team, you will play a critical role in helping evolve the client’s cyber threat intelligence operations. Key to this role is understanding customer intelligence and business priorities and developing tailored cyber threat intelligence findings and capabilities to drive their security outcomes. This will be done through: Developing automation and orchestration pipelines to surface relevant threats based on multiple feeds; Creating timely, relevant, and actionable threat insights based on customers priority intelligence requirements; Upskilling the customers use of cyber threat intelligence through sharing threat intelligence best practices

Requirements

• Minimum of 7 years of experience in the cyber threat intelligence (CTI) field with a specialized focus on intelligence engineering and threat research.
• Strong understanding of security tooling, including the underlying data structures and complex data flows required for modern defense.
• Strong ability to architect scalable solutions to process, deduplicate, and enrich threat data, ensuring all intelligence is accurately tagged and discoverable by analytic end users.
• Knowledge of cyber threat actors, noteworthy attacks, and the ability to quickly recognize shifts or deviations from threat activity baselines.
• Ability to provide tailored defensive recommendations based on identified activity.
• A proven track record of proactive threat hunting within enterprise security consoles with a strong preference for experience using Palo Alto Networks’ Cortex product.
• Experience communicating complex threat intelligence to diverse audiences, including C-suite executives.
• Proven ability to operate under short-fuse deadlines, manage concurrent tasks, and thrive in complex and sometimes ambiguous situations.
• Deep experience with cyber threat intelligence frameworks (e.g., MITRE ATT&CK) and advanced analytical techniques.

Nice To Haves

• Previous experience supporting a customer organization as a designated resource preferred.

Responsibilities

• Integrate intelligence use cases into security tooling, including data feed collation, deduplication, and the creation of threat dashboards.
• Correlate raw network and host-based indicators to attribute activity to specific threat actor groups, intrusion clusters, and malware families.
• Utilize Palo Alto Networks telemetry, commercial tools, and open-source data to identify and track threat activities of interest, pivoting between the customers findings and Palo Alto Networks telemetry.
• Leverage intelligence discoveries to perform threat hunts within the client’s Cortex security console.
• Provide tailored research and analysis for client-based Requests for Information (RFIs) to include relevant cyber threat activities, trends, or shifts in the threat landscape.
• Create a cyber threat profile that identifies top threats and provides tailored defensive recommendations based on their unique operational footprint.
• Assist in upskilling customer team capacity through mentorship sessions, and other micro-learning initiatives on best practices in CTI.
• Provide monthly briefings to customer leadership highlighting relevant threats, trends, and support provided.

What This Job Offers

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