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
Corporate Overview
Proofpoint is a leading cybersecurity company protecting organisations’ 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 organisations 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 is why we are leaders in next-generation cybersecurity.
The Role
Proofpoint is looking for a Senior Data Scientist to join our Machine Learning team. In this role, you'll drive the evolution of our email threat detection engine, which protects some of the largest enterprises globally, from sophisticated email-based threats.
You will collaborate cross-functionally and lead major initiatives end-to-end ensuring that we apply state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to identify and solve the most impactful problems. You will also help promote machine learning best practices and encourage innovative approaches to problem-solving within the team.
Key Responsibilities
Extract and derive actionable insights from massive volumes of unstructured email datasets using distributed computing tools (Spark, Iceberg, Athena) and AWS SageMaker
Engineer features that capture communication behaviors and patterns across billions of email records, translating domain expertise into scalable feature pipelines
Fine-tune LLMs for domain-specific tasks (email topic detection, NER) and train neural network models from scratch on massive volumes of email data to identify anomalous patterns and behaviors indicative of malicious threats
Apply classical machine learning techniques (e.g., boosting, bagging) to train models that classify large volumes of imbalanced datasets with low-latency inference
Deploy trained models to production using AWS SageMaker, directly impacting the effectiveness of our core threat detection products
Partner with Product and Engineering teams to identify high-impact research areas and drive data-driven decision-making
Mentor junior data scientists and drive adoption of ML best practices, fostering a culture of experimentation and continuous learning
Evaluate emerging machine learning and AI advancements, and integrate promising techniques into our threat detection solutions
What We're Looking For
Experience leading high-impact machine learning projects with demonstrated results in production environments
Deep expertise in neural network architectures with proven experience applying them to real-world problems. Experience with graph neural networks or
