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. 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. At Proofpoint you'll be part of a global team that breaks barriers to redefine cybersecurity guided by our BRAVE core values Staff Software Engineer (MIP tech lead)

Staff Software Engineer (MIP tech lead) 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. Architectural direction of the ingestion platform, including Kafka topology, EKS deployment model, as well as feature and API design. Engineering standards for the team code quality, observability, and incident response.

Ingestion SLOs define and own SLOs for throughput, latency, data quality, etc. 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. Help define or refine requirements of engineering-led features.

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.

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. Data engineering principles at enterprise scale idempotency, deduplication, data quality validation,



and observability.

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; database programming; Kubernetes / EKS operational depth pod specs, resource quotas, autoscaling (KEDA), Helm chart management, deployment strategy for stateful or high-throughput workloads.

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. This role is a blend of AI-first software engineering and up-to-date 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 with these technologies RDS/MySQL, SQLite, mail transport agents, Argo Workflows, GitOps

Experience with Agile/Scrum in a distributed team; This is a greenfield technical leadership opportunity on a platform that matters. If you care deeply about data engineering craft, operational excellence, and building systems that scale without breaking the bank, this is the role. Flexible work environment

Annual wellness and community outreach days

Global collaboration and networking opportunities

📌 Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform (Remote) (Toronto)
🏢 Proofpoint
📍 Toronto