Sr. Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer

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.

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.

We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to build, operate, and continuously improve backend services and detection capabilities in a production environment. You will work across the full lifecycle—design, implementation, deployment, monitoring, and incident response—bringing strong engineering fundamentals, operational ownership, and an innovative mindset (including comfort applying AI-assisted approaches) to improve reliability and detection outcomes.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and maintain backend services using Java, Go, and Python, selecting the right tool/language for the job.
• Own operational excellence for your services:
  • Participate in an on-call rotation and handle escalations with urgency and good judgment.
  • Diagnose complex production issues, drive mitigation, and lead root-cause analysis and follow-ups.
• Observability & monitoring:
  • Use and improve alerting/monitoring with PagerDuty, Prometheus, and Grafana.
  • Experience with Coralogix is a strong plus.
• Proactively identify problems before they become incidents:
  • Seek out reliability, performance, and correctness issues.
  • Improve runbooks, dashboards, alert quality, and automation.
• Deliver pragmatic solutions across a mix of work:
  • Comfortable taking on sometimes "boring" but necessary projects (maintenance, migrations, refactors, operational hardening).
  • Bring an innovative spirit—especially around detection solutions and smarter ways to surface/triage issues.
• Collaborate closely with engineers and stakeholders:
  • Communicate clearly in incidents and design discussions.
  • Contribute to a culture of learning, blameless postmortems, and continuous improvement.

Required Qualifications

• Strong experience building production systems with one or more of Java, Go, Python (comfort working across multiple languages preferred).
• Demonstrated ability to operate services in production, including on-call and escalation handling.
• Hungry for new knowledge, innovation, architectural and algorithmic optimizations

Hands-on familiarity with modern observability stacks such as Prometheus (metrics), Grafana (dashboards), and PagerDuty (incident management).

Strong problem-solving skills with a proactive approach to finding and addressing issues.

Team player and effective communicator—able to coordinate during incidents and explain technical tradeoffs clearly.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Coralogix (logging/observability).
• Experience building or improving detection systems (signal extraction, alerting logic, triage workflows).
• Comfort using AI-assisted tooling thoughtfully (e.g., to accelerate investigation, automation, or detection logic), with good engineering judgment.

What Success Looks Like

• Being part of the dynamic team that stops malware/phish attacks and protects our customers in the most effective way.
• Services are reliable, observable, and well-operated, with fewer repeat incidents over time.
• You consistently reduce toil through automation and better monitoring.
• You help the team move faster by being both technically strong and collaborative, taking ownership of ambiguous problems and driving them to closure.

Why Proofpoint?

At Proofpoint, we believe that an exceptional career experience includes a comprehensive compensation and benefits package. Here are just a few reasons you'll love working with us:

• Competitive compensation
• Comprehensive benefits
• Career success on your terms
• Flexible work environment
• Annual wellness and community outreach days
• Always on recognition for your contributions
• Global collaboration and networking opportunities

Our Culture:

Our culture is rooted in values that inspire belonging, empower purpose and drive success-every day, for everyone.

We encourage applications from individuals of all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. If you need accommodation during the application or interview process, please reach out to accessibility@proofpoint.com.

How to Apply

Interested? Submit your application along with any supporting information- we can't wait to hear from you!

Consistent with Proofpoint values and applicable law, we provide the following information to promote pay transparency and equity. Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several U.S. geographic markets, and we pay differently based on those defined markets as set out below. Pay within these ranges varies and depends on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The actual offer will be based on the individual candidate. The range provided may represent a candidate range and may not reflect the full range for an individual tenured employee. This role may be eligible for variable compensation and/or equity. We offer a competitive benefits package, including flexible time off, a comprehensive well-being program with two paid Wellbeing Days and two paid Volunteer Days per year, plus a three-week Work from Anywhere option.

Base Pay Ranges:

SF Bay Area, New York City Metro Area: Base Pay Range: 166,500.00 - 244,200.00 USD

California (excludes SF Bay Area), Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Washington DC Metro, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Texas, Washington, Virginia, and Alaska: Base Pay Range: 136,200.00 - 199,760.00 USD

All other cities and states excluding those listed above: Base Pay Range: 124,100.00 - 182,050.00 USD