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Staff Security ML Researcher

Illumio· Security
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Sunnyvale, California - HQ$221k - $265kFull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

Staff-level role focusing on developing ML-driven approaches for threat detection, risk assessment, and security analytics to model attacker behavior and quantify cyber risk in complex enterprise environments.

Responsibilities

  • Design, develop, and deploy machine learning models that identify anomalous behavior, detect threats, and predict security risk across complex enterprise environments.
  • Apply statistical techniques and predictive modeling to evaluate breach likelihood, attack exposure, and segmentation effectiveness.
  • Build behavioral profiling, anomaly detection, clustering, classification, and forecasting models using large-scale security telemetry.
  • Evaluate model performance, reduce false positives, and continuously improve detection quality through experimentation and data-driven analysis.
  • Analyze large-scale security datasets to identify attacker behaviors, emerging threats, and patterns aligned to frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK.
  • Develop threat scoring and risk assessment models that help customers prioritize remediation and security investments.
  • Leverage graph-based analysis techniques to model attack paths, quantify lateral movement risk, and recommend mitigation strategies.
  • Work closely with threat researchers to transform security intelligence into measurable detection and prediction capabilities.
  • Design and maintain scalable data pipelines used for model training, validation, and analytics.
  • Investigate new features, signals, and telemetry sources to improve detection accuracy and risk predictions.
  • Partner with engineers to productionize models and analytics systems while ensuring scalability, reliability, and observability.
  • Conduct experiments and hypothesis-driven analysis to validate new detection approaches and security insights.
  • Collaborate with product managers, designers, and engineers to embed ML-driven security insights into customer-facing experiences.
  • Influence product strategy through data-backed recommendations and threat intelligence findings.
  • Help define security analytics frameworks, data requirements, and detection methodologies for future product capabilities.
  • Serve as a subject matter expert on the use of machine learning in cybersecurity applications.
  • Explore emerging techniques in machine learning, graph analytics, and AI-driven threat detection.
  • Investigate applications of graph neural networks, probabilistic modeling, and advanced analytics for cyber defense.
  • Contribute to patents, technical publications, conference presentations, and thought leadership initiatives.
  • Stay current on advancements in cybersecurity, machine learning, and adversary tradecraft to continuously evolve Illumio's detection capabilities.

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of experience in security analytics, threat research, detection engineering or data science, machine learning
  • Strong Python programming skills, including experience with data science and machine learning frameworks such as Pandas, NumPy, Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, or PyTorch.
  • Experience designing, training, validating, and deploying machine learning or statistical models in production environments.
  • Proven ability to work with large-scale telemetry datasets from security, networking, cloud, or infrastructure environments.
  • Strong understanding of model evaluation, feature engineering, experimentation, and handling imbalanced datasets.
  • Experience applying analytics or machine learning techniques to cybersecurity problems such as anomaly detection, behavioral analysis, threat hunting, or risk assessment.
  • Familiarity with security frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK and common security telemetry sources.
  • Strong SQL and data querying skills.
  • Excellent communication skills with experience translating technical findings into actionable business and product recommendations.

Skills

Required:PythonML/Statistical ModelingSecurity AnalyticsMITRE ATT&CK
Nice to have:Graph Analytics/Graph ML

Benefits

  • Medical, Dental, Vision Coverage
  • Health and Dependent Savings Accounts
  • Life and Disability Programs
  • Paid Parental Leave
  • Voluntary Benefit Programs
  • Company Sponsored Wellness Program
  • Wellness Reimbursement Program
  • Retirement Savings
  • Equity Opportunities
  • Paid time off and Paid Holidays
  • Employee Incentive Program
Last updated Sep 23, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Illumio

The Breach Containment Company

Explore Illumio, the world's first breach containment platform. Stop cyber attacks before they spread with cloud detection and microsegmentation.

securitycybersecuritynetwork securityzero trustmicrosegmentationcloud detectioncyber attack prevention
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