Staff Software 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.

At Proofpoint, you will find an environment where innovation comes from creative collaboration and where everyone is empowered to go fast and have fun. If you find joy in taking the “im” out of impossible, you will feel right at home with our team! As an AI Engineer, you will be part of a high-caliber Engineering team responsible for designing, building, and managing AI-driven solutions to classify digital communications for regulated industries. You will work closely with Product Management and Engineering Leadership to define technical directions and architectural requirements. You will serve as a technical leader and mentor, promoting best practices in AI experimentation, model evaluation, and cost-effective implementation strategies.

Responsibilities

• Establish a clear AI/ML vision, build support across cross-functional teams, and drive high-impact AI initiatives to completion.

• Develop and deploy transformer-based models for classification tasks, leveraging pre-trained models, fine-tuning techniques, and embedding-based retrieval.

• Evaluate generalized/base models for low true-positive classification problems and design methods to improve performance.

• Implement prompt-based classification techniques and vector-based retrieval to improve accuracy and efficiency.

• Design and conduct experiments to measure model efficacy, balancing performance with computational costs.

• Research available AI/ML technologies and help make informed build vs. buy decisions.

• Ensure AI solutions are scalable, secure, and aligned with enterprise best practices.

• Stay current with the latest advancements in transformers, LLMs, and AI-driven text classification.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong emphasis on AI/ML.

• 4+ years of hands-on experience working with transformer models or NLP

• Experience with one or more of the following AI/ML frameworks and libraries is desired: TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Hugging Face Transformers Expertise in selecting and applying transformer models for text classification problems.

• Experience with prompt engineering, vector-based retrieval, and embedding models.

• Strong understanding of AI cost structures, including model inference costs and optimization strategies.

• Previous experience designing and implementing experiments to measure model efficacy. Strong background in Cloud, Containers, Java and Linux-based architectures.

• Well-versed in Agile/Scrum development processes.

• Excellent communication and problem-solving skills. Degree in Computer Science, AI/ML, or a related field.

Preferred/Desired Experience

• Experience working with Azure Machine Learning API and AWS Bedrock is a plus.

• Familiarity with LLMOps and deploying models in production environments. Understanding of data pipeli