Senior Manager - Security Research Engineering (Xpanse)

Company Description

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks® everything begins and concludes with our mission:

To be the preferred cybersecurity partner, safeguarding our digital lifestyle.

Our vision is of a world where every day is safer and more secure than the last. We are a company founded on the basis of challenging and disrupting the traditional way of things, and we are on the lookout for innovators that are as dedicated to shaping the future of cybersecurity as we are.

Our Approach to Work

We lead with flexibility and choice in all our people programs. We have challenged the conventional notion that all employees have the same needs and wants. We provide personalization and give our employees the opportunity to choose what works best for them whenever possible - from your wellbeing support to your growth and development, and beyond!

At Palo Alto Networks, we believe in the power of collaboration and value physical interactions. This is why our employees typically work from the office three days a week, leaving two days for choice and flexibility to work where you feel most efficient. This setup encourages casual conversations, problem-solving, and trusted relationships. While details may evolve, our goal is to create an environment where innovation thrives, with office-based teams gathering three days a week to collaborate and flourish, together!

Job Description

Your Career

We're looking for a Senior Security Research Engineering Manager to helm Cortex Xpanse’s Security Research teams, responsible for policy and payload generation, along with the creation of automated remediation content.

Xpanse's mission is to identify online risks and protect the globe’s largest organizations from malicious software and hackers. Our Internet intelligence platform gathers petabytes of Internet data, employs artificial intelligence to identify “unknown unknown” risks for customers, and delivers these insights through a SaaS web application.

In this position, you will manage a team responsible for the creation of payloads, used by our internet scanning infrastructure to comprehend what services are available across the worldwide Internet. Your team will also be responsible for crafting new policies, which encode risky device configurations as code that is run over observations from our global scanning data. We expect the team to both proactively derive policies and payloads from newly discovered CVEs and to respond to Xpanse customer requests. Your direction will also be crucial in pushing the limits of the types of risks we can assess through our internet scanning.

You will additionally manage a team responsible for enabling customers to address issues in their attack surface through automation. This team’s roadmap is guided by Palo Alto Network’s ambition to develop the most robust ASM solution in the market that can detect risks, but also contextualize and respond to them automatically.

Your Impact

• Manage a team of security research engineers that can assist Xpanse in identifying and structuring increasingly diverse types of services running on the global Internet
• Manage a team of security architects tasked with constructing the automation necessary to enrich, contextualize, and automatically mitigate risks Xpanse detects on customer attack surfaces
• Oversee Xpanse’s triage and response to new emerging threats. Your team is accountable for both implementing the necessary payloads and policies to detect new critical risks as well as collaborating and communicating with other Xpanse teams, the enhanced Cortex business unit, and broader Palo Alto Networks research teams
• Prioritize among the backlog of customer-requested policies and payloads
• Proactively add topical policies and payloads to your team’s backlog based on trends in exploitation and market demand
• Keep abreast of critical business needs and aid us in continuing to scale; balance resources and projects accordingly

Qualifications

Your Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or other technical discipline (or relevant professional experience) or equivalent military experience required
• Experience managing teams of security researchers or similar technical talents, providing them with thoughtful feedback and with the resources they require to be successful
• Familiarity with concepts such as FIRST TLP, Threat Intelligence, and other vulnerability management and incident response concepts
• Ability to succinctly communicate complex subject matter to technical and non-technical audiences
• High-level understanding of computer networks and of how the Internet functions
• Capability to (nicely) persuade and influence others; ability to collaborate with technical and cross-functional teams who may not report to you to get things done
• Comfort with ambiguity and making decisions with imperfect information

Additional Information

The Team

Cortex Xpanse assists in protecting some of the world’s most important organizations by finding Internet risks that no one else can find. Our security research teams form the core of our products and are responsible for developing security detections for our products that allow customers to convert trillions of Internet data points into critical cybersecurity insights. We are forever innovating — challenging the way we, and the industry, conceptualize cybersecurity. Our engineers are not intimidated by the challenge of creating products to solve problems that have never been addressed before.

We forge the industry instead of waiting for instructions. We need individuals comfortable with ambiguity, thrilled by the prospect of a challenge, and empowered by the unidentified risks threatening our everyday lives that are only made possible by a secure digital environment.

Our Commitment

We're pioneers that dream big, take risks, and challenge cybersecurity’s status quo. It's simple: we can't achieve 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 any other legally protected characteristics.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

The compensation offered for this role 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/commissioned roles) is expected to be between $190,400 per year and $308,000 per year. The offered compensation might also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits can be found .

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