AI Engineer

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 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. Proofpoint.

Job Title: AI Engineer (Agent Systems)

Location Hyderabad, A.P., India Athens, Greece Sunnyvale, CA, USA

Role Overview Proofpoint is building the next generation of AI-powered security systems to protect organizations from rapidly evolving threats. We are looking for a highly skilled AI Engineer to help design and build production-grade agentic AI systems that power intelligent security workflows at scale. This role is focused on developing and deploying autonomous agents that are reliable, composable, cost-efficient, and capable of operating in real-world, high-throughput security environments. You will work closely with security researchers, platform engineers, and product teams to turn cutting-edge agentic AI techniques into robust, automated detection and response capabilities used in production. If you enjoy architecting multi-agent systems, optimizing for reliability and cost, orchestrating tool-using LLMs, and building observable pipelines — while solving difficult security problems — we'd love to talk to you.

Key Responsibilities

Design, build, evaluate, and deploy autonomous AI agents and multi-agent systems for security detection and response use cases

Build reliable, cost-efficient agentic pipelines optimized for latency, accuracy, operational stability, and tool-use fidelity

Develop orchestration frameworks for LLM-based agents with tool use, memory, planning, and multi-step reasoning

Experiment with techniques such as ReAct, chain-of-thought prompting, structured output, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agentic memory architectures Improve agent task completion quality while minimizing hallucination, failure modes, and unnecessary LLM calls

Build scalable agent infrastructure and production-grade agentic workflow pipelines Partner with security researchers to transform detection and triage logic into agent-powered automated workflows

Measure and optimize agent performance across task success rate, cost-per-run, latency, and reliability

Contribute to evaluation frameworks, ground-truth datasets, and agent benchmarking workflows Monitor production agents and continuously improve robustness, observability, and failure recovery

Required Qualifications E

xperience 2+ years of experience in AI Engineering, Applied AI, or ML Engineering

Strong experience building and deploying agentic AI systems or LLM-powered applications in production Experience designing multi-step, tool-using agents using frameworks such as LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, or custom orchestration

Strong Python engineering skills Experience working with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) and open-source models via Hugging Face or similar

Experience implementing RAG pipelines, vector stores, and semantic retrieval systems (e.g., FAISS, Weaviate, Pinecone, pgvector)

Solid understanding of agent evaluation, prompt engineering, structured output parsing, and tool/function calling

Experience deploying agentic systems in cloud or containerized environments

Strong software engineering fundamentals and production mindset

Nice to Have

Experience with security domains such as email security, threat intelligence, phishing detection, or SOC workflows

Familiarity with fine-tuning or adapting LLMs for domain-specific agent behaviors

Experience with observability tooling for LLM systems (e.g., LangSmith, Helicone, OpenTelemetry for AI)

Knowledge of agent safety, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop design patterns

Exposure to agentic memory systems (episodic, semantic, working memory) and long-horizon task planning

Why Proofpoint
Protecting people is at the heart of our award-winning lineup of cybersecurity solutions, and the people who work here are the key to our success. We’re a customer-focused and a driven-to-win organization 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

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!