Job Details

The Role

We are looking for a Senior Security Research Engineer to join Proofpoint's Threat Research team. In this highly technical role you will track threat actors, malware, phishing, and TTPs to develop static and dynamic signatures that detect and prevent threats on a massive scale. Your work will directly impact the efficacy of Proofpoint products, the quality of its intelligence, and the protection of our customers.

Your day-to-day responsibilities

• Stay abreast of an evolving threat landscape, including credential phishing.
• Analyze malware, malicious documents, and URLs from internal and external sources.
• Conduct in-depth analysis of email messages to detect and classify threats such as BEC, phishing, and other malicious campaigns.
• Apply critical thinking to identify efficient mitigation strategies.
• Develop, test, and deploy static and/or behavioral signatures to counter threats.
• Prioritize and fill coverage gaps for relevant threats to minimize customer impact.
• Be on rotation for on-call to respond to customer escalations that cannot be handled by support.
• Collaborate remotely using chat, video, and conference calls.
• Work with engineering teams to define requirements and improve detection capabilities.

What you bring to the team (Qualifications)

• Passion for threat research and a deep understanding of the security threat landscape.
• Demonstrable knowledge of malware, credential phishing, TTPs, and bypass techniques.
• Experience in proactively identifying, responding to, and defending against malware and phishing in production environments.
• Familiarity with browser internals and the Document Object Model.
• Broad understanding of document formats used maliciously (e.g. OLE, CDFv2, PDF, OpenOffice, RTF).
• Experience parsing and analyzing malicious documents.
• Experience leveraging sandbox environments for analysis.
• Critical thinking to develop high-quality detection signatures based on behavior.
• Experience creating YARA and/or ClamAV signatures used in production.
• Proficiency in regular expressions.
• Intermediate-level Python experience.
• Interest in sandbox engineering concepts and synthetic sample creation is a plus.
• Ability to work independently and collaboratively in a distributed team environment.
• Strong communication and self‑directed work ethic.

Additional Information

• Travel: 10%
• Location: Work from home in the United States
• Must be able to work during business hours local to your time-zone

Compensation

Competitive base pay plus variable compensation and/or equity. Base pay varies by geographic location.

Base Pay Ranges

• SF Bay Area, New York City Metro Area: $161,625 - $237,050 USD
• California (excl. SF Bay Area), Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Washington DC Metro, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Texas, Washington, Virginia, and Alaska: $132,225 - $193,930 USD
• All other cities and states: $120,525 - $176,770 USD

Equal Opportunity Statement

Proofpoint is an equal opportunity employer; we hire without consideration for race, religion, creed, color, national origin, age, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, veteran status or disability.