Senior Research Applied AI Engineer
Proofpoint4 days ago
Base Salary
$153k - $294k/yr
Responsibilities
- Frame open-ended AI questions as testable research problems, establish baselines, run focused experiments, and deliver actionable conclusions.
- Build self-improving agentic systems that run evaluations, learn from results, and recover from failures.
- Extend and maintain evaluation infrastructure with task suites, regression checks, and quality, cost, and speed measurements.
- Work with third-party model APIs and open-weight models running on company GPUs, including fine-tuning and efficient serving.
- Benchmark and improve the use of coding agents across company codebases while maintaining correctness and test quality.
- Engage stakeholders to identify meaningful research problems and translate prototypes, playgrounds, and APIs into practical learning tools.
- Advise teams on deploying successful AI systems and monitoring and understanding them in production.
- Mentor engineers, share research findings, and improve the team’s problem-solving practices.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s, master’s, or PhD in computer science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- At least 5 years building software and ML systems, including recent hands-on experience with production-stage LLM systems; 7+ years preferred.
- At least 3 years of research experience involving customer problems and solution development.
- Daily experience with Claude Code, Cursor, or similar coding agents while maintaining high standards for correctness and testing.
- Experience building and deeply evaluating agentic systems in production.
- Experience with third-party model APIs and open-weight models running on a company GPU fleet.
- Strong Python skills and solid machine learning fundamentals.
- Demonstrated expertise in AI evaluation.
- Familiarity with Kubernetes inference platforms, Flyte, LiteLLM, Langfuse, and internal evaluation and tracing tools.
- Preferred experience includes building and evaluating open-weight LLMs, fine-tuning or serving open-weight models, automated prompt and pipeline optimization, multi-GPU serving, MCP and tool protocols, cybersecurity use cases, open-source contributions, or publications.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits.
- Flexible work environment, including a three-week Work from Anywhere option.
- Two paid Wellbeing Days and two paid Volunteer Days per year.
- Annual wellness and community outreach days, recognition programs, and global collaboration and networking opportunities.
- The role may be eligible for variable compensation and/or equity.
Tech Stack
Categories
AI ResearchML Engineering
About Proofpoint
Proofpoint builds cloud-based cybersecurity and compliance products that protect email, collaboration tools, and sensitive data for enterprises and public-sector organizations. Its portfolio includes email threat protection, data loss prevention, security awareness training, archiving/governance, and safeguards for SaaS and AI-driven workflows, sold as subscription software and services. Founded in 2002 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, it is owned by Thoma Bravo, and reports that over 80 of the Fortune 100 use its products.