Staff Data Engineer

About the role

Proofpoint is seeking a Staff Data Engineer to design, build, and operate large‑scale data infrastructure that powers its cybersecurity products and analytics. This senior individual‑contributor role works across the full data lifecycle on AWS.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable data pipelines using AWS Glue (PySpark/Glue Studio) for petabyte‑scale datasets stored in Amazon S3.
• Build and maintain the cloud data lake architecture on S3, defining partition strategies, file formats (Parquet, ORC, Delta) and Glue Data Catalog schemas.
• Establish data quality standards, validation frameworks, anomaly detection and SLA‑driven alerting.
• Define engineering best practices including code reviews, CI/CD for pipelines, Infrastructure‑as‑Code (Terraform/CDK) and DataOps principles.
• Mentor junior engineers, conduct design reviews and influence the technical roadmap.
• Collaborate with data scientists, ML engineers and product managers to translate business requirements into robust data models.
• Champion data governance, lineage tracking and privacy‑by‑design across all data assets.
• Troubleshoot production incidents, perform root‑cause analysis and drive preventive improvements.

Required profile

• 8+ years of professional software or data engineering experience, with at least 4 years focused on cloud data platforms.
• Strong communication skills and proven experience mentoring engineers.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Required skills

• AWS data services: S3, Glue (ETL jobs, Crawlers, Data Catalog, Glue Studio), Athena.
• Python programming, production‑grade PySpark or Spark (Scala) for large‑scale transformations.
• SQL for complex analytical queries.
• Infrastructure‑as‑Code tools: Terraform or AWS CDK.

What we offer

• Competitive compensation
• Comprehensive benefits
• Flexible work environment
• Annual wellness and community outreach days
• Global collaboration and networking opportunities