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 Staff Software Engineer (MIP tech lead)
The Role Proofpoint’s Archiving Ingestion team is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to work from the Toronto office. Proofpoint's Archive is the backbone of our Digital Communications Governance (DCG) product line, serving some of the world's largest enterprises with mission-critical data ingestion, storage, and retrieval. The Ingestion team owns the systems that bring data into the Archive at scale, processing millions of messages daily across email, collaboration, and cloud connectors. We are hiring a Staff Software Engineer to serve as the technical lead for ingestion and data engineering across DCG. This is a high-leverage role: you will define how data enters the platform, at what cost, at what reliability, and with what guarantees. As we evolve the ingestion pipeline to handle additional data types, the architectural decisions made in this role will shape the platform for years. You will be based in Toronto and be the technical lead of a hybrid development team spanning Toronto and India. What You Will Own Architectural direction of the ingestion platform, including Kafka topology, EKS deployment model, as well as feature and API design. Drive the roadmap to a scalable, robust ingestion platform that can handle tomorrow’s needs. Engineering standards for
the team: code quality, observability, and incident response. Ingestion SLOs: define and own SLOs for throughput, latency, data quality, etc. Build observability stacks to track them in production. Incident response model for ingestion: lead RCAs, define failure mode mitigations, and eliminate classes of incidents through systemic fixes. Cost-aware platform improvements that reduce cloud cost-to-serve while preserving reliability, performance, and customer experience. Technical leadership and mentoring of a distributed team of engineers (Toronto & India), fostering engineering excellence and accountability across geographies. Your Day-to-Day Partner with product and engineering leadership to shape
the team’s roadmap, making scope and trade-off decisions grounded in operational and cost realities. Help define or refine
requirements of engineering-led features. Drive architecture reviews, design doc culture, and engineering standards that apply across the MIP team and influence adjacent platform teams. Lead processor engineering on EKS: pod lifecycle management, KEDA-driven autoscaling, resource optimization, and deployment safety for high-throughput workloads. Leverage AI tools (Claude Code, Copilot, etc.) to accelerate design, review, and implementation cycles where they add genuine benefit. Features can extend across software, infrastructure-as-code, automation, and cloud services to enhance the data ingestion capabilities of the Archive. Cross-team influence: aligning other feature teams on ingestion interfaces, APIs, and contracts. Help to troubleshoot and resolve difficult production problems that can affect our various customers across multiple regions and accounts. Be available for very limited on-call during critical deployment activities. Mentor engineers at all levels, fostering technical excellence, knowledge sharing, a culture of innovation, and engineering coherence across timezones. What You Bring to
the Team (Required) Data engineering principles at enterprise scale: idempotency, deduplication, data quality validation, and observability. Deep expertise in streaming and event-driven systems: Kafka (or MSK/Confluent) consumer group design, partition strategy, offset management, schema evolution, and exactly-once semantics. AI-first mindset: You excel with spec-driven development and are willing to mentor others to do the same. Backend systems development: Strong Java engineering; REST API design; database programming; experience with distributed systems design, RPC, service discovery, and advanced OO concepts. Kubernetes / EKS operational depth: pod specs, resource quotas, autoscaling (KEDA), Helm chart management, deployment strategy for stateful or high-throughput workloads. Infrastructure-as-Code proficiency: Terraform/Terragrunt for managing ingestion infrastructure reproducibly. Cloud infrastructure expertise: AWS services including MSK, EKS, S3, IAM, Lambda, and CodePipeline; experience reasoning about cost, multi-AZ resilience, and operational observability in AWS environments. Cost-aware mindset: You think about throughput-per-dollar, right-sizing, and the cost implications of architectural choices as a matter of habit. Demonstrated Staff-level technical leadership: architecture ownership, cross-team influence, mentorship, and setting high standards of engineering quality, in a distributed team context. Communication and collaboration: Excellent verbal and written communication, to drive technical alignment across engineering, product, and security. Education: Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent. What Sets You Apart (Strongly Preferred) This role is a blend of AI-first software engineering and modern DevOps approaches. While strong AI-driven development skills are a hard requirement, any extra infrastructure, cloud service, automation, and configuration management skills are a plus. Some of these nice-to-haves include: Familiarity with archiving, eDiscovery, compliance, storage, or email transport (SMTP/IMAP/Exchange) domains. Experience designing connector protocols or multi-tenant ingestion systems at scale. Experience with these technologies: RDS/MySQL, SQLite, mail transport agents, Argo Workflows, GitOps Experience with Agile/Scrum in a distributed team; opinions on how to run engineering ceremonies effectively across time zones. Experience with stream processing frameworks: Kafka Streams, Apache Flink, or Spark Structured Streaming. Why This Role This is a greenfield technical leadership opportunity on a platform that matters. You will have genuine ownership over a critical system that underpins one of Proofpoint's core product lines. If you care deeply about data engineering craft, operational excellence, and building systems that scale without breaking the bank, this is
the role. 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 [email protected]. How to Apply Interested? Submit your application along with any supporting information- we can’t wait to hear from you! Proofpoint has been honored with six Best Places to Work Awards in 2024 by workplace culture leader Comparably, including Best Company Career Growth, Best Company Outlook, Best Global Culture, Best Engineering Teams, Best Sales Teams, and Best HR Teams. We are the leader in human-centric cybersecurity. Half a million customers, including 87 of the Fortune 100, rely on Proofpoint to protect their organizations. We’re driven by a mission to stay ahead of bad actors and safeguard the digital world. Join us in our pursuit to defend data and protect people. Our BRAVE Values: At Proofpoint, we are BRAVE in everything we do, and our values aren’t just words—they shape
how we work, collaborate, and grow. We seek people who are bold enough to challenge the status quo, responsive in the face of ever-evolving threats, and accountable for delivering real impact. We value those with a visionary mindset who anticipate what’s next and push cybersecurity forward, and we celebrate exceptional execution that ensures we continue to defend data and protect people. Proofpoint is an equal opportunity employer, we hire without consideration to race, religion, creed, color, national origin, age, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, veteran status or disability. Find your network, your allies, and your biggest fans. We know that work is simply better when you’re surrounded by people who inspire you—who share ideas, cheer you on, and genuinely want to see you succeed. That’s why we offer social circles, sponsored networks, and connection points across teams and time zones—to help you find your people, build your community, and thrive together. This isn’t just a job—it’s a mission to protect people and defend data in a world that never slows down. We’re building the future of human-centric cybersecurity, and that future belongs to all of us. We take ownership, move fast, and hold ourselves accountable—because that’s what it takes to stay ahead. And we do it together, winning as one. Be empowered to reach your full potential through meaningful challenges and personalized support—designed around you and your goals. Whether you're growing as a leader or leveling up from great to exceptional as an individual contributor, we’re here to help you get there.
