Principal Ai Engineer

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.

Job Description

Your Career

We're hiring a Principal AI Engineer to lead the technical vision, architecture, and hands-on development of next-generation autonomous AI Agents for our CX and GTM workflows.In this role, you'll build goal-driven agents capable of reasoning, planning, learning, and self-directed execution across complex enterprise environments.

As both a deep technical leader and strategic thinker, you'll shape our company-wide agentic AI strategy, define the product roadmap, and establish best practices in close partnership with CX / GTM domain experts, software engineering, data science, and executive leadership.

This is a high-impact, enterprise-spanning role driving the future of agentic AI at our company.

Your Impact

Lead the design and implementation of AI agents capable of planning, multi-step execution, self-correction, and collaboration with humans or other agents.

Define the architectural blueprint for scalable AI / ML and agentic systems aligned with the enterprise GenAI strategy.

Build, fine-tune, and adapt LLMs, multimodal models, and specialized agent models.

Lead end to end Design, implementation and integration of traditional AI / ML systems (eg data science / statistical models) into agentic workflows.

Create advanced reasoning pipelines, retrieval systems, and knowledge-graph integrations to enable autonomous task execution.

Ensure production readiness through rigorous testing, evaluation frameworks, and real-world performance validation.

Drive the full solution lifecycle—from prototype to production—ensuring scalability, reliability, safety, observability, and high performance across all AI / ML and agentic components.

Partner with data engineering teams to design high-quality datasets, synthetic data pipelines, and continuous learning feedback loops.

Mentor and guide data scientists and engineers, establishing AI standards / guidelines for data science and engineering across the organization.

Communicate complex technical decisions, trade-offs, and recommendations to executives and cross-functional stakeholders.

Qualifications

Your Experience

Masters / PhD in Computer Science, AI, Data Science or related field.

15+ years in data science, software engineering, data engineering, ML or Applied AI experience, including architecting large-scale distributed systems.

Deep expertise in implementing AI / ML systems using LLMs, RAG, Agent Frameworks (eg LangChain, LangGraph) and and advanced intelligent autonomous systems

Significant experience building production systems involving, ML Models, LLM inference, fine-tuning, orchestration Multi-step reasoning and planning, Tool / function calling etc.

Up-to-date with latest LLM model capabilities and their evolution like GPT, Anthropic, Llama models etc.

Hands-on experience in building supervised, unsupervised and semi-supervised models / solutions.

Demonstrated ability to lead high-ambiguity cross-team technical initiatives.

Strong proficiency in SQL to analyse structured data relational data bases.

Strong proficiency in at least one core language (Python, Go, Java, or equivalent).

Strong knowledge of distributed systems, microservice architecture and cloud platforms (AWS / Azure / GCP).

Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence at all levels of the organization.

Additional Information

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.

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 accommodations@paloaltonetworks.com.

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.