Senior Data Scientist

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 advanced fraud detection techniques is highly desirable 

• Proficiency with one or more deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX). Experience with PyTorch Geometric or DGL is a plus 

• Hands-on expertise with gradient boosting frameworks (XGBoost, CatBoost, LightGBM) for imbalanced classification tasks 

• Experience monitoring and maintaining model performance in production, including detection and mitigation of model and data drift 

• Experience leveraging LLMs and agentic workflows for research and problem-solving is a plus 

• A collaborative mindset with genuine passion for high-impact work and a commitment to fostering innovative thinking within the team 

• Strong listening skills; open to input from other team members and departments 

Why Proofpoint 

Protecting people is at the heart of our award-winning cybersecurity solutions, and the people who work here are the key to our success.  We’re a customer-focused and driven-to-win organisation with leading-edge products. We are an inclusive, diverse, multinational company that believes in culture fit, but more importantly ‘culture-add’, and we strongly encourage people from all walks of life to apply.   

We believe in hiring the best and the brightest to help cultivate our culture of collaboration and appreciation. Apply today and explore your future at Proofpoint! #LifeAtProofpoint