Software Engineer III, Applied Agentic AI

Proofpoint; United States; Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Comprehensive benefits

Flexible work environment

Global collaboration and networking

Job summary

Proofpoint is seeking an Agentic AI Engineer to help build our agentic AI platform—the runtimes, MCP access layer, and evaluation tooling that product teams rely on across the company.

You’ll absorb new models and frameworks, establish best practices, and demonstrate them in reference agentic applications for engineers to learn from and extend. This is at the frontier of AI tech and collaboration is key.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of engineering experience with hands-on work on LLM or agentic systems beyond prototype.
• Strong understanding of agent runtimes, tool integration, memory, planning, orchestration, evals and guardrails.
• Experience building services in a cloud microservices environment (containers, CI/CD, automated deployment; AWS a plus).

Responsibilities

• Build reference agentic applications end-to-end on Proofpoint's platform.
• Document best practices: tool design, MCP integration, prompt/context management, memory, latency and cost considerations.
• Design evaluation harnesses with task suites and metrics to guide shipping decisions.
• Turn ambiguous questions into working PoCs and present results to stakeholders.
• Harden prototypes into reusable platform capabilities for product teams.
• Collaborate with engineers, researchers, and product leads to deepen system knowledge.
• Socialize patterns through demos, reviews, and developer guides.
• Engage with cross-team design discussions to collect stakeholder requirements.

Skills

Python

TypeScript/Node

LLM/agentic systems

Distributed systems tracing

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science or related field

Tools

LangGraph

Anthropic/OpenAI Agents SDK

MCP

LangChain

Job description

About Us:

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.

How We Work:

At Proofpoint you’ll be part of a global team that breaks barriers to redefine cybersecurity guided by our BRAVE core values:

Bold in how we dream and innovate

Responsive to feedback, challenges and opportunities

Accountable for results and best in class outcomes

Visionary in future focused problem-solving

Exceptional in execution and impact

The Role

Proofpoint is hiring an Agentic AI Engineer on the team building our agentic AI platform — the agent runtimes, MCP access layer, and evaluation tooling that product teams across the company build on. You’ll be building for other engineers: the people shipping agentic features into products that thousands of enterprises rely on around the clock.

This role sits at the frontier of agentic technology. New models, frameworks and protocols land faster than any single product team can absorb, and part of your job is to absorb them first: work out what actually holds up, establish the best practices, and prove them out in reference agentic applications that other teams can learn from and build on. You get first look at the new stuff, and the fun part of the job is showing engineers across the company what it can do.

What you’ll do

• Build reference agentic applications on our platform — end-to-end examples of how agents should be designed, evaluated, deployed and monitored at Proofpoint.
• Establish and document best practices: tool design and MCP integration, prompt and context management, memory and planning, cost/latency tradeoffs, failure recovery, and what “release-ready” means for a nondeterministic system.
• Design evaluation harnesses — task suites, baselines, and quality, cost and latency metrics — and use them to decide what ships.
• Turn ambiguous questions into working prototypes quickly, and present results to the teams who asked; recommend just as readily when an approach should be abandoned.
• Harden successful prototypes into reusable platform capabilities that product teams can adopt.
• Partner with experienced engineers, security researchers and product tech leads to go deep on the systems you build on.
• Socialize agentic patterns across the company through demos, design reviews, written guides, and pairing sessions.
• Communicate and understand stakeholders’ requirements and participate in cross-team design discussions.

What we’re looking for

• Bachelors or Master’s Degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 3+ years of engineering experience, with recent hands‑on work on LLM or agentic systems that went past the prototype stage.
• Good understanding of the agentic development lifecycle and its components - agent runtimes, tool and MCP integration, prompt and context management, memory, planning, orchestration, evals, tracing, guardrails, rollout and rollback.
• Solid Python; TypeScript/Node a plus.
• Experience working with globally distributed teams.
• Experience building and running services in a cloud microservices environment — containers, CI/CD, automated deployment; AWS a plus.
• Comfortable diagnosing distributed systems from traces and metrics; OpenTelemetry (including GenAI semantic conventions) a plus.
• An eval‑first mindset: measurement comes with the build, not after it.
• Genuine enthusiasm for frontier AI — you already experiment with agent frameworks and LLM SDKs (LangGraph, Anthropic/OpenAI Agents SDK, MCP, LangChain or similar) and follow where the field is going.
• Initiative and a bias toward shipping — you pick up ambiguous problems, get a PoC working and presented in days rather than quarters, and keep moving when the path isn’t mapped out.
• Fast learner with real curiosity — you want to know how the systems underneath you work, not just how to call them.

Preferred

• Use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex or similar) and familiarity with agent interoperability protocols such as MCP and A2A.
• Building eval harnesses, benchmarks or ground‑truth datasets.
• Producing developer‑facing reference implementations, SDK samples, or internal enablement material.
• AG and semantic retrieval (vector stores, hybrid search), and working with both hosted APIs and open‑weight models.

Why Proofpoint?

At Proofpoint, we believe that an exceptional career experience includes a comprehensive compensation and benefits package. Here are just a few reasons you’ll love working with us:

• Competitive compensation
• Comprehensive benefits
• Career success on your terms
• Flexible work environment
• Annual wellness and community outreach days
• Always on recognition for your contributions
• Global collaboration and networking opportunities

Our Culture:

Our culture is rooted in values that inspire belonging, empower purpose and drive success-every day, for everyone.

We encourage applications from individuals of all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. If you need accommodation during the application or interview process, please reach out to [e-mail].