Interested in this AI/ML Engineer role at Palo Alto Networks?
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Santa Clara, California, United States Product Engineering Ref ID: JR\-011995
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
Your Career
The Prisma AIRS team is building the future of AI security. With organizations building complex ecosystems of AI models, applications, and agents, a dynamic new attack surface is emerging. Prisma AIRS delivers a comprehensive platform for AI security, encompassing model security, posture management, AI red teaming, and runtime protection.
As the Director of Engineering responsible for ML engineering and platform, you will be a key leader in the organization, setting the technical vision and strategy for a significant area of development within Prisma AIRS. You will be responsible for driving the development of this industry\-defining platform, scaling our engineering teams, and collaborating with senior leadership to ensure our technology strategy aligns with the broader business objectives.
Your Impact
Strategic Leadership: Define and execute the technical strategy and roadmap for your area of ownership within the Prisma AIRS engineering organization, managing multiple teams and engineering managers.
Organizational Scaling: Build and lead a high\-performing engineering organization. Excel at recruiting, mentoring, and retaining top\-tier engineering talent and managers.
Technical Vision: Drive the architectural direction for a complex, highly scalable, cloud\-native AI security platform within your domain. Make critical high\-judgment decisions on technology, architecture, and long\-term design.
Cross\-Functional Execution: Partner seamlessly with senior leaders across Product Management, AI Research, UX, and other engineering leaders to deliver on a cohesive product roadmap.
Executive Communication: Clearly articulate technical vision, strategy, project status, and risks to senior stakeholders and executive leadership.
Culture of Innovation: Foster a results\-oriented culture of innovation, execution, collaboration, and engineering excellence, empowering teams to solve challenging problems.
Qualifications
Your Experience
Education: BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
Required Qualifications:
12\+ years of professional software development experience, with a proven track record of building and shipping high\-quality, large\-scale, enterprise\-grade cloud delivered services. Extensive professional experience with a deep focus on MLOps, ML systems, or productionizing machine learning models at scale.
MLOps pipelines
Model governance/lifecycle
AI observability stack, Big Data infra
(Kafka/Spark)
GenAI/LLM platform
IaC/GitOps
AI safety/governance
Leadership:
6\+ years of formal engineering management experience, with experience leading multiple teams (managing managers is a plus).
Technical Acumen:
Exceptional technical judgment with deep, hands\-on experience in designing, building, and operating highly scalable cloud\-native services with recent experience delivery AI/ML capabilities or building AI/ML platforms in production.
Strategic Mindset:
Demonstrated ability to translate complex business needs into a clear, actionable technical strategy and roadmap.
Communication:
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with a strong executive presence and the ability to champion ideas and initiatives across the organization.
Preferred Qualifications:
- ### Proven track record of managing geographically distributed teams.
- ### Experience presenting at industry conferences or engaging with executive\-level customers.
- ### Deep experience in the cybersecurity domain (e.g., threat detection, network security, cloud security, application security).
- ### Direct experience with AI/ML platforms, MLOps, or building security solutions for AI systems.
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.
$232,000\.00 \- $320,750\.00/yrOur 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
Salary Context
This $232K-$320K range is above the 75th percentile for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $180K across 1889 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 3,736 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 69% of the market. At Palo Alto Networks, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills in Demand for This Role
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $181,357 based on 12,694 positions with disclosed compensation. Director-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $248,100. This role's midpoint ($276K) sits 52% above the category median. Disclosed range: $232K to $320K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,650. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($275,000) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $97,880; Mid: $165,000; Senior: $227,400; Director: $248,100; VP: $250,000.
Palo Alto Networks AI Hiring
Palo Alto Networks has 25 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer, AI Software Engineer, AI Product Manager. Positions span Santa Clara, CA, US, Austin, TX, US. Compensation range: $204K - $344K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 15% (562 positions) offer remote work, while 3,158 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (2,643 roles, $211,000 median); San Francisco (2,168 roles, $253,000 median); Los Angeles (1,792 roles, $191,580 median).
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 3,736 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 109 entry-level, 1,755 mid-level, 1,486 senior, and 386 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (562 positions). The remaining 3,158 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,650. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($275,000 median, 41 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 55 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 434 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 3,736 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,564), Data Scientist (311), AI Software Engineer (277). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (109) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,755) and senior (1,486) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 386 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (562 positions), with 3,158 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $200,100. Top-quartile roles start at $253,650, and the 90th percentile reaches $307,500. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Engineering Manager roles lead at $275,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $140,000. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,942 postings), Aws (1,175 postings), Azure (881 postings), Rag (827 postings), Gcp (718 postings), Prompt Engineering (590 postings), Pytorch (586 postings), Claude (528 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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