Senior Data Scientist

Proofpoint is looking for a Senior Data Scientist to join our Algo team. The key responsibility for this role is to further enhance our email threat detection engine that protects some of the largest businesses in the world.

You will collaborate cross‑org with Product and Engineering and lead major initiatives end‑to‑end ensuring that we apply state‑of‑the‑art machine learning tools and 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.

Your day‑to‑day:

• Wrangle and draw meaningful insights from massive amounts of unstructured email datasets using the latest tools and technologies like Spark, Iceberg, Athena, AWS SageMaker.
• Apply tested machine learning model techniques (Boosting/Bagging) to classify large amounts of imbalanced labelled datasets.
• Develop and implement advanced anomaly detection models and algorithms to identify unusual patterns, behaviours for detecting email threats.
• Directly impact the effectiveness of our core products by training and deploying models to production using AWS SageMaker as the MLOps platform.
• Brainstorm, communicate, and partner with Product and Engineering teams promoting a data‑driven approach to identify focus areas for data science research.
• Mentor data scientists, drive best practices and cultivate an environment of experimentation and learning.
• Stay up‑to‑date and explore the latest advancements in machine learning, AI technologies, and incorporate them into our solutions where applicable.

What you bring to the team:

• Experience leading multiple highly impactful machine learning projects with proven results.
• In‑depth experience with boosting machine learning frameworks for imbalanced classification tasks e.g., XGBoost or Catboost.
• Conceptual understanding of Graph Neural Networks and experience applying GNNs to solve real world problem statements.
• Prior experience in fraud detection, particularly in applying graph neural networks or other advanced machine learning algorithms to detect fraud is desirable.
• In‑depth experience with one or more deep neural network frameworks e.g., PyTorch, Tensorflow, JAX.
• Experience with PyTorch Geometric or DGL is a plus.
• Experience monitoring and maintaining performance of models over time in production taking into account model/data drifts.
• A creative mindset, propensity to care deeply about the impact their team has and to encourage novel ways of critical thinking in their team.
• Great 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.