The Role
This team is the front line of defense for protecting our customers from email messaging abuse. We need a creative, enthusiastic individual to join a geographically distributed team that works 24/7/365 (“follow the sun”) to identify, parameterize, and respond quickly to spam, phishing, malware, and email‑fraud attacks against some of the world’s largest organizations.
Your day-to-day
• Analyze misclassified email messages, URLs, attachments, and identify new threat features to improve detection technologies.
• Perform deep analysis of email headers, structures, and attachments to develop new rules and methods to detect emerging threats.
• Research new trends and create proactive detection methods to stop threats before they appear.
• Contribute to the development of new analysis tools and automation to aid in front‑line analysis and threat identification.
• Collaborate with the team to devise novel detection approaches.
• Investigate complex customer false‑negative or false‑positive cases escalated by other analysts.
• Handle internal escalation tickets from field teams for customers with ongoing issues, working with engineering teams when necessary.
• Participate in on‑call duty, responding to high‑priority alerts from our threat monitoring system and monitoring essential systems.
• Help define the landscape, prevalence, and evolution of messaging abuse through future product requirement discussions.
What you bring to the team
• Strong analytical and creative problem‑solving skills.
• Proficient oral and written communication skills and the ability to explain complex technical concepts to customers.
• Familiarity with the Linux command line and tools for manipulating and extracting content from text files.
• Good knowledge of regular expressions.
• Understanding of mail delivery, including SMTP.
• General curiosity about email header and structure.
• Experience in a data science or similar role (plus).
• Willingness to interact with customers through a web‑based ticketing system to resolve issues.
• Ability to work independently and collaborate with remote teams worldwide.
• Positive, friendly attitude that enjoys problem solving.
• BSc or equivalent in an IT‑related subject, or equivalent technical experience.
• Experience with signature‑based detections such as Clam, Yara, or similar is an advantage.
• Familiarity with a scripting language such as Python or Perl is a big plus.
• U.S. Citizenship required.
Benefits
• Competitive compensation.
• Comprehensive benefits.
• Career success on your terms.
• Flexible work environment.
• Annual wellness and community outreach days.
• Recognition for contributions.
• Global collaboration and networking opportunities.
• Three‑week Work‑from‑Anywhere option.
• Paid Wellbeing Days and Volunteer Days per year.
Base Pay Ranges
• SF Bay Area, New York City Metro Area: $136,200 – $214,005.
• California (excl. SF Bay Area), Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Washington DC Metro, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Texas, Washington, Virginia, Alaska: $112,700 – $177,100.
• All other cities and states: $101,600 – $159,720.
Equal Opportunity Statement
Proofpoint is an equal‑opportunity employer. We hire without consideration of race, religion, creed, color, national origin, age, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, veteran status, or disability.