Senior Staff Data Scientist

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.

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.

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.

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.

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