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
The Role
We are seeking an AI Knowledge Engineer to join our AI and Machine Learning organization at Proofpoint. This role is focused on enabling AI systems to operate across distributed enterprise knowledge ecosystems by creating semantic representations, governance frameworks, and knowledge architectures that unify information while preserving ownership, lineage, and trust.
As an AI Knowledge Engineer, you will help design and build semantic knowledge systems that enable AI agents, retrieval systems, and decision-support applications to reason over complex organizational information. You will work at the intersection of knowledge representation, semantic modeling, governance, and generative AI, helping establish the foundations that allow AI systems to operate effectively across federated and distributed knowledge sources.
This is an early-career role intended for individuals with strong technical aptitude, curiosity, and a passion for solving complex information management challenges using modern AI technologies.
What You Bring to the Team
As a core member of the AI organization, you will play a critical role in developing the knowledge infrastructure that powers enterprise AI initiatives. You will collaborate closely with data scientists, machine learning engineers, software engineers, product managers, and domain experts to transform organizational knowledge into scalable AI-ready assets.
We are looking for someone with a strong foundation in semantic modeling, knowledge representation, data governance, and large language model technologies. You should be passionate about enabling AI systems to reason effectively over enterprise knowledge and helping bridge the gap between organizational information and intelligent decision-making.
Success in this role requires balancing technical implementation with information architecture principles, ensuring that knowledge remains accurate, discoverable, governed, and valuable across the organization.
Success in This Role
Within your first 12 months, you will contribute to:
Building semantic knowledge models that connect previously isolated information sources.
Developing AI-ready knowledge architectures that improve agent accuracy and reasoning quality.
Establishing governance and metadata standards that improve trust and discoverability.
Supporting federated knowledge initiatives that allow AI systems to leverage knowledge while respecting ownership and compliance boundaries.
Measuring and improving how effectively AI agents discover, retrieve, reason over, and utilize enterprise knowledge.
Day-to-Day Responsibilities
Design and maintain semantic models that represent business concepts, relationships, and organizational knowledge.
Develop and manage knowledge representations that enable AI systems to reason over enterprise information.
Build and enhance knowledge graphs and related semantic technologies to connect information across disparate systems.
Create and maintain taxonomies, ontologies, metadata standards, and governance frameworks.
