About Us:
Proofpoint is a global leader in human- and agent-centric cybersecurity. We protect how people, data, and AI agents connect across email, cloud, and collaboration tools. Over 80 of the Fortune 100, 10,000 large enterprises, and millions of smaller organizations trust Proofpoint to stop threats, prevent data loss, and build resilience across their people and AI workflows. Our mission is simple: safeguard the digital world and empower people to work securely and confidently. Join us in our pursuit to defend data and protect people.
How We Work:
At Proofpoint you’ll be part of a global team that breaks barriers to redefine cybersecurity guided by our BRAVE core values:
Bold in how we dream and innovate
Responsive to feedback, challenges and opportunities
Accountable for results and best in class outcomes
Visionary in future focused problem-solving
Exceptional in execution and impact
Senior / Staff Software Engineer (Foundation)
The opportunity
Join Proofpoint’s engineering organization and help build the systems and services that turn massive volumes of threat-related data into usable, trusted information for our analysts, researchers, and data scientists.
In this role, you will design, build, and improve data pipelines, platform capabilities, and supporting services that ingest, transform, store, and expose large-scale security data. Your work will directly influence how quickly and effectively Proofpoint can detect emerging threats, understand attacker behavior, and improve protections for our customers.
This is a hands-on engineering role with meaningful impact. You will work across cloud infrastructure, backend services, data pipelines, storage systems, and internal platforms to make high-volume data reliable, discoverable, and actionable. This role includes helping shape technical direction, drive engineering quality, and raise the effectiveness of the broader team through leadership, mentoring, and sound technical judgment.
A day in your life
As a Senior or Staff Engineer, you will partner with other developers, threat analysts, and data scientists to understand what data, services, and workflows they need in order to support critical business and security use cases.
One day, you might work with a threat intelligence researcher to define a new pipeline or dataset needed to investigate an emerging campaign. The next, you could be implementing or improving a production service that makes that data available in near real time to internal users.
On another day, you may be building or maintaining shared platform services, improving observability, hardening reliability, or reviewing architectural choices for a new internal capability.
You will work with large, messy, high-volume datasets and modern cloud services to build systems that are scalable, maintainable, and operationally sound.
You will be expected to think beyond just code delivery, including testing, monitoring, alerting, documentation, and long-term maintainability.
You will also help lead technical discussions, identify opportunities to simplify or strengthen shared systems, and guide implementation approaches across projects and engineers.
What you bring to the team
Core requirements
An inquisitive mindset and the ability to learn where data exists in a large, distributed system, what it means, and how it can be used effectively
Strong ability to build reliable services, tools, and data pipelines that make complex data usable at scale
A commitment to engineering quality, including testing, operational readiness, and maintainable design
Qualifications
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
For Senior level: typically 5+ years of relevant experience, or 7+ years in a similar role
For Staff level: typically 7+ years of relevant experience, or 9+ years in a similar role
Expert-level proficiency in at least one of the following languages: Java, Scala, or Go
Experience designing, building, and operating production-level software in a public cloud environment
Experience building systems with strong operational foundations, including testing, monitoring, and alerting, to support demanding SLAs at scale
Recent hands-on experience with relational databases and SQL such as MariaDB and MySQL required
Recent hands-on experience with Elasticsearch required
Experience building and maintaining backend services, data pipelines, or other high-volume distributed systems
Comfort working in Linux/Unix environments and using CLI-based development and debugging workflows
Helpful experience
Experience with AWS services, especially data and serverless technologies such as SQS, Lambda, Glue, or Spark
Experience working with large-scale analytics or near-real-time data processing systems
Familiarity with containers
Why Proofpoint?
At Proofpoint, we believe that an exceptional career experience includes a comprehensive compensation and benefits package. Here are just a few reasons you’ll love working with us:
Competitive compensation
Comprehensive benefits
Career success on your terms
Flexible work environment
Annual wellness and community outreach days
Always on recognition for your contributions
Global collaboration and networking opportunities
Our Culture:
Our culture is rooted in values that inspire belonging, empower purpose and drive success-every day, for everyone.
We encourage applications from individuals of all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. If you need accommodation during the application or interview process, please reach out to [email protected].
How to Apply
Interested? Submit your application along with any supporting information- we can’t wait to hear from you!
