Sustaining Engineer

Sustaining Engineer – Archive Platform

Company Overview
At Proofpoint, we protect people, data, and brands from advanced threats and compliance risks. We build and operate a highly scalable cloud security platform trusted by more than half of the Fortune 100. Our teams combine deep technical expertise with operational excellence to deliver resilient, high-scale systems that customers rely on every day.

The Role
We are seeking a highly technical Sustaining Engineer to support and strengthen our Archive platform. This role sits at the intersection of engineering and production operations and is responsible for deep technical investigations, root cause analysis, and long-term stability improvements.
Our Archive solution is a large-scale distributed system spanning legacy data center components and modern AWS cloud infrastructure. The codebase is extensive and complex, and this role requires a full stack engineer who can move confidently across services, APIs, databases, messaging systems, and infrastructure layers.
This is not a traditional support role. You will act as an engineering owner for production issues, working directly in the code, debugging live systems, and implementing durable fixes that improve reliability and performance.
You will also participate in a 24x7 on-call rotation and play a key role in maintaining production health for mission critical services.

What You Will Do
Lead deep technical investigations into production issues across the Archive platform
Perform root cause analysis across application, database, infrastructure, and cloud layers
Implement code level and architectural fixes to improve system reliability
Partner with Support and Product teams on high severity customer escalations
Drive systemic improvements that reduce recurring incidents and operational toil
Improve observability, logging, and debugging capabilities
Contribute to zero downtime deployments and service resiliency improvements
Participate in on-call rotation and respond to critical production incidents

What You Bring
5 or more years of experience building and operating commercial software systems
Strong proficiency in one or more object oriented languages such as C#, Java, or C++
Deep understanding of distributed systems, concurrency, and high availability architectures
Experience debugging complex, large scale production systems
Full stack capability across backend services, APIs, databases, and infrastructure
Experience working in hybrid environments spanning data center and AWS cloud
Strong troubleshooting and analytical skills with the ability to diagnose ambiguous system failures

Experience with CI/CD, source control, automated testing, and production monitoring tools
Ability to work effectively in high pressure situations and manage multiple priorities
Excellent communication skills and the ability to explain complex technical issues clearly

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with Microsoft Exchange and MAPI
Experience operating systems in AWS including EC2, S3, RDS, IAM, and related services
Familiarity with messaging systems, search platforms, and large scale storage systems
Experience participating in or leading incident response

Why This Role Matters
The Archive platform supports some of the largest organizations in the world. Reliability and performance are critical. This role ensures that our systems remain resilient, scalable, and stable while we continue to evolve the architecture and migrate customers to Archive 6.0.
If you enjoy solving hard technical problems, diving into complex systems, and improving production reliability at scale, this role will challenge and reward you.