Sr Staff Researcher (Agentic AI Systems Security - Prisma AIRS)

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.

About the Team Prisma AIRS AI Supply Chain Security owns the full supply-chain security posture for agentic-AI systems at Palo Alto Networks, covering the models, artifacts, tools, and extensions that enterprise AI applications are built on. We turn threat research into the scanning and detection capabilities that let customers adopt agentic AI without inheriting its supply-chain risk.

We are looking for a security engineer to lead threat research and detection strategy for agentic AI systems, in a hands-on role split across research and engineering. You will model the threat surface across the full agentic stack — agents, skills, MCP servers, and traditional model artifacts, including their configurations and deployment architecture — for both proprietary hosted models and in-house custom deployments, then build that research into production scanning capabilities and own the services that ship them.   Core Technical Focus & Ownership You bring systemic fluency in the agentic threat landscape: direct and indirect (cross-domain) prompt injection, jailbreak and guardrail bypass, instruction-hierarchy violations, and the agent-loop failures they enable — excessive agency, goal drift, and memory or RAG poisoning. That extends into the tool and extension layer: MCP tool poisoning, tool shadowing, server rug pulls, OAuth scope and token-passthrough abuse, and supply-chain risk in third-party skills and plugins. Deployment posture matters equally — exposed inference endpoints, least-privilege tool scoping and ephemeral credentials, insecure output handling, and egress control over the channels that turn a single injection into data loss. In production, you run the pipeline itself: service health, latency and availability targets, release quality, and false-positive/false-negative regression gates, with on-call response and observability as day-to-day work.

Impact Shape detection and scanning strategy by identifying the vulnerability, exploit, and attack-technique areas in the agentic-AI domain where new or improved protections are needed. Drive innovative detection ideas from concept to production , delivering measurable improvements in coverage, quality, speed, or scalability. Expand the team's ability to deliver protections at scale through practical automation, detection pipeline improvements, and AI-assisted research workflows. Provide hands-on technical leadership to researchers and developers through direction, review, problem decomposition, and execution guidance. Influence cross-functional decisions with product, QA, engineering, and research partners to ensure detections are technically sound, customer-relevant, and production-ready. Support the operational excellence of