Senior / Staff Software Engineer (Foundation)

The opportunity

Join Proofpoint’s engineering organization and help build the systems and services that turn massive volumes of threat-related data into usable, trusted information for our analysts, researchers, and data scientists.

In this role, you will design, build, and improve data pipelines, platform capabilities, and supporting services that ingest, transform, store, and expose large-scale security data. Your work will directly influence how quickly and effectively Proofpoint can detect emerging threats, understand attacker behavior, and improve protections for our customers.

This is a hands-on engineering role with meaningful impact. You will work across cloud infrastructure, backend services, data pipelines, storage systems, and internal platforms to make high-volume data reliable, discoverable, and actionable. This role includes helping shape technical direction, drive engineering quality, and raise the effectiveness of the broader team through leadership, mentoring, and sound technical judgment.

A day in your life

As a Senior or Staff Engineer, you will partner with other developers, threat analysts, and data scientists to understand what data, services, and workflows they need in order to support critical business and security use cases.

One day, you might work with a threat intelligence researcher to define a new pipeline or dataset needed to investigate an emerging campaign. The next, you could be implementing or improving a production service that makes that data available in near real time to internal users.

On another day, you may be building or maintaining shared platform services, improving observability, hardening reliability, or reviewing architectural choices for a new internal capability.

You will work with large, messy, high-volume datasets and modern cloud services to build systems that are scalable, maintainable, and operationally sound.

You will be expected to think beyond just code delivery, including testing, monitoring, alerting, documentation, and long-term maintainability.

You will also help lead technical discussions, identify opportunities to simplify or strengthen shared systems, and guide implementation approaches across projects and engineers.

What you bring to the team

Core requirements

• An inquisitive mindset and the ability to learn where data exists in a large, distributed system, what it means, and how it can be used effectively

• Strong ability to build reliable services, tools, and data pipelines that make complex data usable at scale

• A commitment to engineering quality, including testing, operational readiness, and maintainable design

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience

• For Senior level: typically 5+ years of relevant experience, or 7+ years in a similar role

• For Staff level: typically 7+ years of relevant experience, or 9+ years in a similar role

• Expert-level proficiency in at least one of the following languages: Java, Scala, or Go

• Experience designing, building, and operating production-level software in a public cloud environment

• Experience building systems with strong operational foundations, including testing, monitoring, and alerting, to support demanding SLAs at scale

• Recent hands-on experience with relational databases and SQL such as MariaDB and MySQL required

• Recent hands-on experience with Elasticsearch required

• Experience building and maintaining backend services, data pipelines, or other high-volume distributed systems

• Comfort working in Linux/Unix environments and using CLI-based development and debugging workflows

Helpful experience

• Experience with AWS services, especially data and serverless technologies such as SQS, Lambda, Glue, or Spark

• Experience working with large-scale analytics or near-real-time data processing systems

• Familiarity with containers