Staff Security ML Researcher

ONWARDS TOGETHER! Illumio is the leader in ransomware and breach containment, redefining how organizations contain cyberattacks and enable operational resilience. Powered by the Illumio AI Security Graph, our breach containment platform identifies and contains threats across hybrid multi-cloud environments – stopping the spread of attacks before they become disasters. Recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Wave™ for Microsegmentation, Illumio enables Zero Trust, strengthening cyber resilience for the infrastructure, systems, and organizations that keep the world running. LOCATION: 4 ON-SITE DAYS A WEEK IN SUNNYVALE, CA HEADQUARTERS. OUR TEAM'S VISION: The Office of the CTO and Security team sets the strategic technical direction of the company while keeping both Illumio and our customers secure. Those who join us represent the leader in Zero Trust Segmentation and maintain Illumio’s competitive advantage by exploring new technologies while collaborating with Engineering and Product Management. We are looking for people who leverage differences and push the pace of innovation in a time when the world faces its greatest cybersecurity threats in history.    About the Role We're seeking a Staff Security ML Researcher to develop machine learning-driven approaches for threat detection, risk assessment, and security analytics. In this role, you'll apply advanced statistical methods, machine learning, and graph-based analysis to identify threats, model attacker behavior, and quantify cyber risk across complex enterprise environments. Working at the intersection of cybersecurity, machine learning, and product innovation, you'll partner with threat researchers, engineers, and product teams to transform large-scale security data into intelligent models, actionable insights, and customer-facing capabilities that help organizations better understand and reduce cyber risk. YOUR IMPACT: Machine Learning & Security Intelligence - 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. Threat Research & Risk Modeling - 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. Data Science & Analytics Engineering - 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. Product Collaboration & Innovation - 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. Research & Thought Leadership - 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. YOUR TOOLKIT: Required 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,