Software Engineer III, Applied Agentic AI

Software Engineer III, Applied Agentic AI

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.

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 [email protected].