Senior Applied AI Engineer - Research to Production, Remote

Proofpoint; Colorado; Hybrid; USD 167,000 - 245,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Comprehensive benefits

Flexible work environment

Wellbeing days & Volunteer days

Work from Anywhere option

Job summary

Proofpoint is seeking a Senior Applied AI Engineer to own research from framing the question to deployment. You’ll work on an Applied AI Research team turning questions into testable evidence, refining models, and guiding production deployment with monitoring.

Expect cross‑functional collaboration, long feedback loops, and impactful, scalable AI solutions across security contexts. You will mentor engineers, build prototypes and APIs, and help stakeholders turn problems into research worth

Qualifications

• Bachelors, Masters or PhD in Computer Science or related field or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years building software and ML systems, with recent hands-on work on LLM systems that went past the prototype stage, 7+ years preferred.
• 3+ years of research experience (understanding customer problems and deriving/brainstorming solutions).
• Experience with Claude Code, Cursor or similar, used daily, without lowering your standard for correctness and tests.
• Experience in building and deeply evaluating agentic systems in production.
• Experience with third‑party model APIs and open‑weight models (we run on our own GPU fleet).
• Strong Python and solid ML fundamentals.
• Demonstrated expertise in AI evaluation, one of the most challenging and strategically important areas of modern artificial intelligence.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes inference platform, Flyte for orchestration, LiteLLM / Langfuse and internal tooling for evaluation and tracing.

Responsibilities

• Answer hard questions with evidence.
• Take a question nobody has answered yet.
• Make it testable, set a baseline, run the smallest experiment that settles it, and come back with an answer the company can act on.
• Build systems that improve themselves.
• A lot of our agentic work runs in long loops: run an evaluation, study the results, produce a better version, run it again.
• You’ll build systems that improve on their own and recover when they go wrong.
• Make agent behavior measurable.
• Extend our evaluation platform so we can tell whether an agent is genuinely good - task suites, regression checks, and honest tradeoffs between quality, cost and speed.
• Work across hosted and self-hosted models and deploy through third‑party model APIs or open‑weight models.
• Help engineers get more out of coding agents and mentor the team.

Skills

Python

LLM systems

AI evaluation

Agentic systems

Third‑party model APIs

Open‑weight models

Coding agents

Customer problems understanding

Education

Bachelor’s, Master’s or PhD in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Kubernetes inference platform

Flyte

LiteLLM / Langfuse

Job description

Proofpoint is seeking a Senior Applied AI Engineer to own research from framing the question to deployment. You’ll work on an Applied AI Research team turning questions into testable evidence, refining models, and guiding production deployment with monitoring.

Expect cross‑functional collaboration, long feedback loops, and impactful, scalable AI solutions across security contexts. You will mentor engineers, build prototypes and APIs, and help stakeholders turn problems into research worth