Staff Software Engineer - Ingestion & Data Platform Lead

Proofpoint; Toronto; On-site; CAD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Proofpoint’s Archiving Ingestion team is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to serve as the technical lead for ingestion and data engineering across DCG. You’ll define how data enters the platform, cost, reliability, and guarantees, based in Toronto with a hybrid team in Toronto and India.

You’ll own architectural direction, ensure coding standards, define SLOs, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product and security to deliver scalable, cost-aware data ingestion for our Archive.

Qualifications

• Data engineering principles at enterprise scale (idempotency, deduplication, data quality validation, observability).
• Deep expertise in streaming and event-driven systems (Kafka, MSK, Confluent).
• AI-first mindset; mentor others in spec-driven development.
• Backend systems development: Java, REST APIs, distributed systems.
• Kubernetes/EKS pod management, autoscaling, Helm, stateful workloads.
• Infrastructure-as-Code with Terraform/Terragrunt.
• AWS services: MSK, EKS, S3, IAM, Lambda, CodePipeline; cost awareness.
• Staff-level leadership, cross-team influence, mentorship.
• Strong communication across engineering, product, security.
• Degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering.

Responsibilities

• Architect ingestion platform: Kafka topology, EKS model, feature and API design.
• Set engineering standards for code quality, observability, and incident response.
• Define ingestion SLOs; build observability to track throughput, latency, data quality.
• Lead RCAs and mitigations to prevent incidents in ingestion.
• Improve cost-to-serve while maintaining reliability and performance.
• Mentor distributed engineers across time zones.

Skills

Data engineering

Kafka streaming

AI-first mindset

Backend systems

Kubernetes / EKS

IaC Terraform

AWS cloud

Cost optimization

Staff-level leadership

Communication skills

Education

CS/CE degree

Tools

MSK/Kafka

EKS

Terraform/Terragrunt

Argo Workflows

GitOps

RDS/MySQL

Spark / Flink

Job description

Proofpoint’s Archiving Ingestion team is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to serve as the technical lead for ingestion and data engineering across DCG. You’ll define how data enters the platform, cost, reliability, and guarantees, based in Toronto with a hybrid team in Toronto and India.

You’ll own architectural direction, ensure coding standards, define SLOs, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product and security to deliver scalable, cost-aware data ingestion for our Archive.