Senior Staff Data Scientist

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks®, we’re united by a shared mission—to protect our digital way of life. We thrive at the intersection of innovation and impact, solving real-world problems with cutting-edge technology and bold thinking. Here, everyone has a voice, and every idea counts. If you’re ready to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who are just as passionate as you are, you’re in the right place.

Who We Are

In order to be the cybersecurity partner of choice, we must trailblaze the path and shape the future of our industry. This is something our employees work at each day and is defined by our values: Disruption, Collaboration, Execution, Integrity, and Inclusion. We weave AI into the fabric of everything we do and use it to augment the impact every individual can have. If you are passionate about solving real-world problems and ideating beside the best and the brightest, we invite you to join us!

We believe collaboration thrives in person. That’s why most of our teams work from the office full time, with flexibility when it’s needed. This model supports real-time problem-solving, stronger relationships, and the kind of precision that drives great outcomes.

Job Summary

We are seeking a versatile Senior Staff Data Scientist to join our team and help shape the future of our business operations. This role is a unique hybrid of classical machine learning and applied AI. You will tackle diverse and impactful projects, from building predictive models that drive key business decisions to characterizing and optimizing the performance of our emerging AI agentic systems.

You are an entrepreneurial problem-solver who thrives in ambiguous environments and enjoys bridging the gap between technical execution and business strategy. In this role, you will act as both a builder, developing and deploying ML models, and a strategic partner, consulting with business teams to unlock new opportunities with data and AI. If you are passionate about wearing multiple hats, working in a fast-paced setting, and delivering high-quality, impactful work, we want to hear from you.

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

Key Responsibilities

• 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 customer churn prediction, supply chain and finance forecasting.

• 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 marketing, sales, product, finance and go-to-market teams. You'll translate business challenges into data science problems, 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, chart 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.

• Data Storytelling: Don’t just build the model; sell the solution. You will visualize your findings (using Tableau, Looker, or custom coding) to make complex data intuitive for business stakeholders.

• Collaboration: Partner closely with Business partners to translate their business goals into technical data requirements.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• Education & Experience: Bachelor’s degree with 5+ years of related experience; OR Master’s degree with 3+ years of related experience; OR PhD in a quantitative field (Computer Science, AI, Statistics, Physics, etc.) with 1+ years of experience (academic research applies).

• Strong foundation in statistics and probability theory and commonly used data science algorithms.

• Proven hands-on experience building and deploying machine learning models in a production environment.

• 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.

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

Preferred Qualifications

• 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, or mix modeling.

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/com-missioned roles) is expected to be the annual range listed below. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found here.

$125,600.00 - $203,125.00/yr

Our Commitment

We’re trailblazers that dream big, 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?: Yes