Sr. Security Research Engineer

About Us:
We are the leader in human-centric cybersecurity. Half a million customers, including 87 of the Fortune 100, rely on Proofpoint to protect their organizations. We’re driven by a mission to stay ahead of bad actors and safeguard the digital world. 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.

Corporate Overview

Proofpoint is a leading cybersecurity company protecting organizations’ greatest assets and biggest risks: vulnerabilities in people. With an integrated suite of cloud-based solutions, Proofpoint helps companies around the world stop targeted threats, safeguard their data, and make their users more resilient against cyber-attacks. Leading organizations of all sizes, including more than half of the Fortune 1000, rely on Proofpoint for people-centric security and compliance solutions mitigating their most critical risks across email, the cloud, social media, and the web.
We are singularly devoted to helping our customers protect their greatest assets and biggest security risk: their people. That’s why we’re a leader in next-generation cybersecurity.
Protection Starts with People.  Proofpoint.

Company Overview

At Proofpoint, people are at the heart of our award-winning lineup of cybersecurity solutions, and the people who work here are the key to our success, and to that of our customers. We’re customer-focused, collaborative and committed to excellence. Through a culture of diversity, honesty and initiative, we deliver meaningful innovation that helps manage today’s biggest threats. With opportunities in all functions, we offer many exciting reasons to join our team.

The Role

This highly technical role has a direct and real-time impact protecting Proofpoint customers. As a Senior Security Research Engineer on Proofpoint’s Threat Research team, you’ll be part of an amazing, collaborative, industry-leading team focused on tracking threat actors, malware, phishing, and TTPs in order to develop static and dynamic (behavioural) signatures that detect and prevent threats on a massive scale. If you enjoy keeping abreast of and analysing attacker techniques, malware and phishing campaigns, and using that knowledge to counteract those threats on a broad scale, then this is the role for you. This role has an absolute and direct impact on the efficacy of Proofpoint products, the quality of Proofpoint’s intelligence, and the protection of Proofpoint customers.

Your day-to-day

• Stay abreast of a constantly evolving threat landscape including the credential phishing landscape

• Analyse malware, malicious documents, and malicious URLs provided by internal and external sources

• Conduct in-depth analysis of email messages to detect and classify threats such as business email compromise (BEC), phishing, and other malicious campaigns.

• Apply critical thinking skills to identify the most efficient and effective way to mitigate the analysed threat

• Develop, test, and deploy appropriate static and/or behavioural signatures to mitigate the analysed threat

• Identify, prioritize, and fill coverage gaps for relevant threats to minimize customer impact • Be on the rotation for on-call to respond customer FN/FP escalations that cannot be addressed by customer support

• Work effectively as part of a remote team using chat, video chat and conference calls

• Work with engineering teams, defining requirements, for continuous improvement of critical detection capabilities

What you bring to the team

• A passion for threat research and a well-rounded yet deep understanding of the security threat landscape

• Demonstrable understanding of the malware and credential phishing landscape, TTPs, and experience overcoming bypass techniques

• Experience proactively identifying, responding to, and defending against malware and credential phishing threats in production environments

• Familiarity with browser internals and the Document Object Model

• Broad and demonstrable understanding of document formats commonly used for malicious purposes (e.g. OLE, CDFv2, PDF, OpenOffice, RTF)

• Experience parsing and analysing malicious documents

• Experience leveraging sandbox environments as an analysis tool

• Critical thinking: Able to develop high quality detection signatures based on analysis of malicious behaviour

• Experience creating YARA and/or ClamAV signatures used in produc