Security Research Engineer

Overview

About Proofpoint:
We are the leader in human-centric cybersecurity. Half a million customers, including 87 of the Fortune 100, rely on Proofpoint to protect their organizations. We’re driven by a mission to stay ahead of bad actors and safeguard the digital world. 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.

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.

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

• Modify existing web-based UI for internal tools to maintain and extend the sandbox submission and report UI for Proofpoint threat researchers to use

• Write C or C++ for low level interactions with the OS as needed

• 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…