Sr. Software Engineer

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

Sr. Software Engineer — Job Description

Role Summary

We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to build, operate, and continuously improve backend services and detection capabilities in a production environment. You will work across the full lifecycle—design, implementation, deployment, monitoring, and incident response—bringing strong engineering fundamentals, operational ownership, and an innovative mindset (including comfort applying AI-assisted approaches) to improve reliability and detection outcomes.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and maintain backend services using Java, Go, and Python, selecting the right tool/language for the job.
• Own operational excellence for your services:
  • Participate in an on-call rotation and handle escalations with urgency and good judgment.
  • Diagnose complex production issues, drive mitigation, and lead root-cause analysis and follow-ups.
• Observability & monitoring:
  • Use and improve alerting/monitoring with PagerDuty, Prometheus, and Grafana.
  • Experience with Coralogix is a strong plus.
• Proactively identify problems before they become incidents:
  • Seek out reliability, performance, and correctness issues.
  • Improve runbooks, dashboards, alert quality, and automation.
• Deliver pragmatic solutions across a mix of work:
  • Comfortable taking on sometimes “boring” but necessary projects (maintenance, migrations, refactors, operational hardening).
  • Bring an innovative spirit—especially around detection solutions and smarter ways to surface/triage issues.
• Collaborate closely with engineers and stakeholders:
  • Communicate clearly in incidents and design discussions.
  • Contribute to a culture of learning, blameless postmortems, and continuous improvement.

Required Qualifications

• Strong experience building production systems with one or more of Java, Go, Python (comfort working across multiple languages preferred).
• Demonstrated ability to operate services in production, including on-call