Staff AI Platform Engineer

About the Team

The AI Forge is an internal machine learning group that consults across Proofpoint's entire product portfolio. We are a group of machine learning scientists and software engineers who love keeping up with the latest ML research, fostering a collaborative and creative workplace, and solving challenging problems. Over the past several years, we have developed data-driven product features, leveraging a range of model architectures from tree-based models to state-of-the-art transformers.

About the Role

As a Staff AI Platform Engineer at Proofpoint, you will play a key role in shaping our AI Platform, which powers AI Research and production services. This platform spans public cloud infrastructure, shared services, developer tooling, and secure workflows that allow AI teams to innovate quickly and responsibly.

You will work at the intersection of cloud platforms, production services, and AI enablement. Your contributions will accelerate AI innovation across Proofpoint while ensuring our platform remains resilient, scalable, and secure.

Responsibilities

• Design and build platform resources using Infrastructure as Code (IAC) (e.g. Terraform, Helm).

• Architect and scale secure cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure) that support distributed training and large-scale API services.

• Deliver and operate shared services and tooling that empower Data Scientists and Engineers across Proofpoint.

• Ensure reliability, security, and compliance while enabling high-velocity development.

• Partner with AI and product teams to integrate and train models securely and efficiently.

• Mentor other engineers, champion best practices, and influence technical direction across teams.

• Continuously explore new technologies and approaches to improve platform performance, security, and developer experience

Qualifications

• Deep experience building and running public cloud infrastructure at scale, with strong knowledge of at least one major public cloud provider (AWS and Azure preferred).

• Strong software engineering skills (Python preferred), with an emphasis on building maintainable, secure, and reliable systems.

• Hands-on experience with Linux containers and orchestration (Kubernetes).

• Track record of operating API services and/or shared infrastructure at scale.

• Strong understanding of cloud security, identity management, and networking.

• Ability to influence technical direction, drive cross-team initiatives, and mentor others.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with distributed training for AI/ML workloads.

• Experience with data privacy and regulatory frameworks (GDPR, CCPA, AI Act, ISO 42001, etc.).

• Experience with privacy-preserving AI techniques (federated learning, differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, secure enclaves).

• Understanding of adversarial ML or AI security threat modeling.

Why Proofpoint

As a customer focused and driven-to-win organization with leading edge products, there are many exciting reasons to join the Proofpoint team. We believe in hiring the best the brightest and cultivating a culture of collaboration and appreciation. As we continue to grow and expand globally, we understand that hiring the right people and developing great teams is key to our success! We are a multi-national company with locations in many countries, with each location contributing to Proofpoint’s amazing culture! #LI-AN1