[Hiring] Principal Threat Intelligence Researcher @Palo Alto Networks

Role Description

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 augments their existing capabilities.

• 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. Custom tailored content should empower defensive actions for clients, providing their threat intelligence and security teams with key observations, insights, and perspective.
• 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.
• 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.
• Anticipatory Threat Knowledge Creation: Develop structured intelligence insights tracking adversary trends, motivations, organizational priorities, and historical region and industry targeting patterns.
• 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.
• 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.

Qualifications

• 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, signaling 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.
• Experience presenting at CTI or cyber threat research conferences preferred.
• History of triaging and modeling open source data, telemetry, and other intelligence sources to quickly respond to requests for information.
• 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.

Company Description

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.

• This role is remote, but distance is no barrier to impact.
• Our hybrid teams collaborate across geographies to solve big problems, stay close to our customers, and grow together.
• You will be part of a culture that values trust, accountability, and shared success where your work truly matters.