Senior Data Scientist

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Corporate Overview

Proofpoint is a leading cybersecurity company protecting organizations’ greatest assets and biggest risks: vulnerabilities in people. With an integrated suite of cloud-based solutions, Proofpoint helps companies around the world stop targeted threats, safeguard their data, and make their users more resilient against cyber-attacks. Leading organizations of all sizes, including more than half of the Fortune 1000, rely on Proofpoint for people-centric security and compliance solutions mitigating their most critical risks across email, the cloud, social media, and the web. We are singularly devoted to helping our customers protect their greatest assets and biggest security risk: their people. That’s why we’re a leader in next-generation cybersecurity. Protection Starts with People.

The Role

We are seeking a Semi-Senior Data Scientist with at least 3 years of experience to join our collaborative Machine Learning and Data Science Scrum Team at Proofpoint. This role is integral to developing data-driven solutions for cybersecurity challenges, applying advanced analytics, machine learning, and statistical modeling to detect and prevent threats. You will work across the entire data science lifecycle, from data exploration and feature engineering to model development, evaluation, and deployment in production environments.

What You Bring to the Team

As a core team member, you will play a crucial role in designing and optimizing data-driven security solutions. You will work closely with MLOps engineers, data engineers, and software developers, ensuring models are scalable, robust, and integrated into our production systems.

We are looking for someone with a strong background in statistics, anomaly detection, XGBoost, Decision Trees, NLP, Deep Learning, combined with hands-on experience in building, training, and deploying machine learning models. Familiarity with adversarial machine learning and security-related data challenges is a plus, but the primary focus will be on developing and refining data science methodologies to enhance cybersecurity solutions. Computer science degrees are a plus since we DS are responsible of e2efor end-to-end development and deployment of models.

Your contributions will drive our ability to detect cyber threats more effectively, reinforcing Proofpoint’s mission to protect organizations from security risks.

Day-to-Day Responsibilities

• Analyze and model large-scale cybersecurity data to detect anomalies and improve attack detection strategies.

• Develop and refine machine learning models, focusing on fraud detection, anomaly detection, NLP, and predictive modeling.

• Design and execute A/B tests to validate model effectiveness and improve cybersecurity solutions.

• Collaborate with engineers and MLOps specialists to deploy models and optimize data pipelines.

• Monitor and evaluate model performance, ensuring robustness and accuracy in production.

• Stay up to date with emerging machine learning and security trends, identifying new techniques to enhance our detection systems.

• Actively engage with and learn from those around you including data scientists, engineers, threat analyst, and product management.

• Maintain good rapport with stakeholders and design scalable solutions for their problems.

Desired Skills & Experience

• Proficiency in Python, with hands-on experience in machine learning frameworks like Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, or PyTorch.

• Strong SQL skills (or experience with AWS Athena) to query and manipulate large datasets.

• Experience in NLP, LLM like BERT, LLAMA, etc.

• Familiarity with AWS services such as S3, SageMaker, and Glue to build scalable data science solutions.

• Basic understanding of adversarial machine learning concepts and security analytics is a plus.

The one thing missing here is stakeholder management. I suggested 2 bullets off the cuff at the bottom.

Why Proofpoint

As a customer focused and driven-to-win organization with leading edge products, there are many exciting reasons to join the Proofpoint team. We believe in hiring the best the brightest and cultivating a culture of collaboration and appreciation. As we continue to grow and expand globally, we understand that hiring the right people and developing great teams is key to our success! We are a multi-national company with locations in many countries, with each location contributing to Proofpoint’s amazing culture!  #LI-AN1

If you like wild growth and working with happy, enthusiastic over-achievers, you'll enjoy your career with us!