Staff Data Scientist, Full Stack - job 1 of 2

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

We take our mission of protecting the digital way of life seriously. We are relentless in protecting our customers and we believe that the unique ideas of every member of our team contributes to our collective success. Our values were crowdsourced by employees and are brought to life through each of us everyday - from disruptive innovation and collaboration, to execution. From showing up for each other with integrity to creating an environment where we all feel included.

As a member of our team, you will be shaping the future of cybersecurity. We work fast, value ongoing learning, and we respect each employee as a unique individual. Knowing we all have different needs, our development and personal wellbeing programs are designed to give you choice in how you are supported. This includes our FLEXBenefits wellbeing spending account with over 1,000 eligible items selected by employees, our mental and financial health resources, and our personalized learning opportunities - just to name a few!

At Palo Alto Networks, we believe in the power of collaboration and value in-person interactions. This is why our employees generally work full time from our office with flexibility offered where needed. This setup fosters casual conversations, problem-solving, and trusted relationships. Our goal is to create an environment where we all win with precision.

Your Career

As a Staff Data Engineer and Scientist, you will be an integral member of our Customer Analytics team, responsible for shaping the future of our business operations through robust data infrastructure and advanced analytical solutions. This unique hybrid role combines data engineering and applied AI/ML, requiring an entrepreneurial problem-solver who thrives in tackling ambiguous business problems through their deep understanding of the business as well as deep technical expertise. You will act as both a strategic partner as well as builder, developing deep insights , building, developing and curating new datasets, as well as owning the end to end ML/AI model deployment for key customer success initiatives.  

You will be constantly challenged by tough engineering and design tasks, working in a fast-paced setting to deliver high-quality, impactful work.

This is an in office role 3 days/week in our HQ, Santa Clara, CA

Your Impact

In this versatile role, you will drive impact across both data engineering and data science domains:

Data Engineering Foundations

• Design & Development: Design and implement scalable data architectures and datasets that support the organization's evolving data needs, providing the technical foundations for our analytics team and business users. 

• Data Engineering: Support and implement large datasets in batch/real-time analytical solutions leveraging data transformation technologies.

• Data Security & Scalability: Enable robust data-level security features and build scalable solutions to support dynamic cloud environments, including financial considerations.

• Process Improvement: Perform code reviews with peers and make recommendations on how to improve our end-to-end development processes.

AI/ML Innovation & Business Impact

• Develop & Deploy Classical ML Models: Own the end-to-end lifecycle of machine learning projects. You'll build and productionize sophisticated models for critical business areas such as marketing attribution, customer churn prediction, case escalation and other relevant use-cases to post-sales. 

• Optimize AI Agentic Systems: Play a key role in our generative AI initiatives. You will be responsible for characterizing, evaluating, and fine-tuning AI agents—such as conversational systems that allow users to query massive datasets using natural language—to improve their accuracy, efficiency, and reliability.

• Partner with Business Stakeholders: Act as an internal consultant to our Go-to-Market (GTM), Global Customer Services (GCS) and Product and Finance teams. You'll translate business challenges into data science use-cases, identify opportunities for AI-driven solutions, and present your findings in a clear, actionable manner.

• Own the Full Data Science Lifecycle: Your responsibilities will cover the entire project workflow, working with the business to understand the problem, charting a path to solve the problem, feature engineering, model selection and training, robust evaluation, deployment, and, in partnership with the data platform team, ongoing monitoring for performance degradation.

Your Experience 

• 7 plus years experience building and maintain data pipeline both for reporting, analysis and feature engineering.

• Experience building and optimizing clean, well-structured analytical datasets for business and data science use cases. This includes Implementing and supporting Big Data solutions for both batch (scheduled) and real-time (streaming) analytics.

• Prior experience working extensively within dynamic cloud environments, specifically Google Cloud Services (GCS) BigQuery and Vertex AI.

• Prior experience developing dashboards in Tableau/Looker or similar data viz platform.

• Nice to have: Experience implementing and managing data-level security features to ensure data is protected and access is properly controlled.

• Expert-level programming skills in Python and familiarity with core data science and machine learning libraries (e.g., Scikit-learn, Pandas, PyTorch/TensorFlow, XGBoost).

• A solid command of SQL for complex querying and data manipulation.

• Proven ability to work autonomously, navigate ambiguity, and drive projects from concept to completion.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior working experience in Customer Analytics space and customer experience use-cases, e.g. Escalation, Risk predictors, Renewals and efficiency of project delivery in Professional Services space.

• Direct experience with generative AI, including hands-on work with LLMs and frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, or the Hugging Face ecosystem.

• Experience in evaluating and optimizing the performance of AI systems or agents.

• Demonstrated expertise in specialized modeling domains such as causal inference, time-series analysis. 

• An MS or PhD in a quantitative field like Computer Science, AI, Statistics, or equivalent practical experience or equivalent military experience.

The Team

Working at a high-tech cybersecurity company within Information Technology is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. You’ll join the brightest minds in technology, creating, building, and supporting tools and enabling our global teams on the front line of defense against cyberattacks.

We’re connected by one mission but driven by the impact of that mission and what it means to protect our way of life in the digital age. Join a dynamic and fast-paced team of people who feel excited by the prospect of a challenge and feel a thrill at resolving technical gaps that inhibit productivity.

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 $143000- $231000/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.

Is role eligible for Immigration Sponsorship? No. Please note that we will not sponsor applicants for work visas for this position.