Machine Learning Engineer

Machine Learning Engineer

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 Machine Learning Engineer to help design and build production-grade ML systems that power intelligent security detections at scale. This role is focused on developing and deploying fine-tuned models that are small, fast, reliable, and cost-efficient — 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 ML techniques into robust detection capabilities used in production. If you enjoy optimizing models for latency, efficiency, inference cost, and operational reliability — while solving difficult security problems — we'd love to talk to you.

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

Role Overview

- Design, train, fine-tune, and evaluate machine learning models for security detection use cases

- Build lightweight, high-performance models optimized for low latency, low inference cost, high throughput, operational reliability

- Develop fine-tuning pipelines for LLMs and smaller transformer-based models

- Experiment with techniques such as distillation, quantization, pruning, retrieval augmentation, parameter-efficient fine tuning (LoRA, adapters, etc.)

- Improve detection quality while minimizing false positives and false negatives - Build scalable ML infrastructure and production inference pipelines

- Partner with security researchers to transform detection logic into ML-powered systems

- Measure and optimize model performance across quality, speed, memory footprint, and cost

- Contribute to data engineering and labeling workflows for supervised training - Monitor production models and continuously improve robustness and reliability.

Required Qualifications

- Experience 2+ years of experience in Machine Learning Engineering or Applied AI

- Strong experience building and deploying ML systems in production

- Experience fine-tuning transformer models or LLMs Strong Python engineering skills

- Experience with modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch, Hugging Face, TensorFlow (optional)

- Experience optimizing models for inference efficiency and scale

- Solid understanding of model evaluation, experimentation, data pipelines, distributed training

- Experience deploying models in cloud or containerized environments

- Strong software engineering fundamentals and production mindset

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

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 View email address on click.appcast.io.

How to Apply

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