Corporate Overview

Proofpoint is a leading cybersecurity company protecting organizations’ greatest assets and biggest risks: vulnerabilities in people. With an integrated suite of cloud-based solutions, Proofpoint helps companies around the world stop targeted threats, safeguard their data, and make their users more resilient against cyber-attacks. Leading organizations of all sizes, including more than half of the Fortune 1000, rely on Proofpoint for people-centric security and compliance solutions mitigating their most critical risks across email, the cloud, social media, and the web. We are singularly devoted to helping our customers protect their greatest assets and biggest security risk: their people. That’s why we’re a leader in next-generation cybersecurity. Protection Starts with People.

Staff Security Research Engineer

Your day-to-day

• Design and develop software using a variety of languages, primarily Python, with little external guidance, while providing technical leadership to guide other software engineers on the team

• Some skill in modifying existing web-based UI for internal tools is needed to maintain and extend the sandbox submission and report UI for Proofpoint threat researchers to use

• Some work requires skill in writing C or C++ for low level interactions with the OS

• Develop and maintain web browser interaction capabilities using Chrome web driver

• Analyze and Reverse Engineer JavaScript that fingerprints web browser artifacts to identify sandbox web browsers or instrumentation, and innovate solutions to defeat those checks

• Familiarity with analyzing web front-end and the Document Object Model (DOM)

• Develop and maintain software for processing network traffic, including TLS decryption and processing PCAP files

• Work closely with threat analysts and detection engineers who research threat actors and write detection rules which run on the systems you develop

• As needed, create new detection languages and systems that allow threat researchers to develop detection rules

• Add features to existing threat detection languages to allow greater flexibility by threat researchers to automate interactions with websites and detect threat patterns

• Make use of AI Large Language Models as appropriate to enhance threat detection pipelines, produce samples to test evasion countermeasures, and make sound decisions about when applying AI is a benefit vs. a detriment to achieving goals

• Design and develop automation pipelines to turn manual tasks into automated scripts

• Stay abreast of a constantly evolving threat landscape

• Understand the latest tactics, techniques, and procedures used by threat actors to bypass detection environments, especially URL sandbox fingerprinting / detection / evasion techniques used by threat actors

• As needed, provide expert assistance and support to threat researchers and analysts as they analyze phishing websites, threat detection evasion techniques, and security research or red team demonstrations of new evasion techniques

• As needed to support sandbox countermeasure development, reverse engineering malware executable files for Windows (note: primary malware reverse engineering responsibilities rest on other job roles and are not expected regularly for this role).

• Apply critical thinking skills to identify the most efficient and effective way to mitigate threats and evasions

• Work effectively as part of a remote team using chat, video chat and conference calls

• Work with other engineering teams, defining requirements, for continuous improvement of critical detection capabilities

What you bring to the team

As a Security Research Engineer on Proofpoint’s Threat Research team, you’ll be part of an amazing, collaborative, industry-leading team focused on tracking threat actors, malware, phishing, and TTPs and responding to the quickly changing threat landscape with innovative software that detects and prevents threats from reaching Proofpoint customers. If you enjoy keeping abreast of and analyzing attacker techniques, malware and phishing campaigns, and using that knowledge to counteract those threats with innovative software solutions, then this is the role for you.

• A passion for threat research and a well-rounded yet deep understanding of the security threat landscape and actor TTPs, especially understanding how to develop countermeasures for threat actor evasions and sandbox detection techniques

• Ability to write production-grade, reliable Python code with instrumentation that supports observability and monitoring of performance and errors is required

• Experience developing software using Docker containers is required

• Experience developing web browser automation is required

• Experience analyzing network traffic for threat detection and a solid understanding of TLS, HTTP, and other network protocols used by malware is required

• Willing and able to work independently and collaboratively as part of a distributed team of industry-leading security researchers

• Ability to perform the above in a fully remote work environment

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The following skills and experience are nice to have, but candidates lacking them should still apply:

• Experience with C and C++ is a plus

• Experience developing Windows API hooks and knowing how to research undocumented Windows API internal functions is a plus

• Experience writing malware behavior signatures

• Some experience analyzing malware using a debugger, and willingness to learn is a plus

• Experience with statically reverse engineering malware using IDA Pro, Ghidra, Binary Ninja, or other reverse engineering tools is a plus, although being an expert is not required

• Ability to accurately interpret the forensic output of dynamic analysis (sandbox) environments

• Experience with a variety of publicly-available malware sandboxes (for example: Cuckoo, Joe Sandbox, Any Run, Triage, etc.)

Additional Information

• Travel: 1% - 10% (flexible) mainly for team collaboration or security conferences

• Location: Canada (Remote), US (Remote), Argentina (Remote), UK (Remote), Ireland (Remote), Germany (Remote), France (Remote), Switzerland (Remote)

• Must be able to work during business hours local to your time-zone

Why Proofpoint

As a customer focused and driven-to-win organization with leading edge products, there are many exciting reasons to join the Proofpoint team. We believe in hiring the best the brightest and cultivating a culture of collaboration and appreciation. As we continue to grow and expand globally, we understand that hiring the right people and developing great teams is key to our success! We are a multi-national company with locations in many countries, with each location contributing to Proofpoint’s amazing culture! #LI-AN1