Role Description
Nuclei is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help lead the evolution of our Capture and Intelligence platform inside Proofpoint. This person will work in a Python-first monorepo that powers communications capture, compliance workflows, event processing, AI classification, agentic investigations, and emerging decision-governance products. This is a role for someone who can operate in real production complexity: external APIs, OAuth flows, rate limits, async job orchestration, Postgres data modeling, customer-specific edge cases, LLM-powered intelligence, and enterprise-grade reliability. The ideal candidate is not just a strong coder, but a technical owner who can bring clarity to ambiguous systems and raise the quality of everyone around them.
What You’ll Own
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Design, build, and maintain critical backend systems across capture services, shared platform models, event pipelines, async workers, APIs, and AI/intelligence workflows.
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Lead technical execution for ambiguous, high-impact projects that span multiple services or domains.
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Work directly in systems that ingest and normalize communications data from platforms like Microsoft, Slack, Zoom, Google, Bloomberg, Salesforce, Proofpoint Archive, and other enterprise sources.
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Contribute to AI-native product surfaces including LLM classification, agent runs, investigator workflows, telemetry, evaluations, and future decision-tracing capabilities.
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Improve reliability, observability, testability, and operational maturity across a fast-moving production codebase.
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Debug difficult customer and production issues involving data correctness, API behavior, async failures, scale, performance, and compliance-sensitive workflows.
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Mentor engineers through design review, code review, pairing, technical writing, and clear architectural judgment.
What Success Looks Like
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You quickly become one of the people others trust for the hardest technical questions.
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You can read unfamiliar parts of the codebase, understand the domain model, and make safe changes without needing perfect documentation.
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You ship pragmatic, well-tested code while also improving the underlying system design.
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You help the team move faster without creating avoidable operational risk.
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You make ambiguous projects feel tractable by decomposing them into clear technical decisions.
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You balance product urgency, customer needs, engineering quality, and long-term maintainability.
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You are comfortable working close to production and close to customers when needed.
Technical Environment
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Python 3.12, Pydantic, psycopg/Postgres, SQL, async job systems, AWS, SQS/Lambda-style orchestration, Docker/local mock environments.
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Shared platform models for accounts, feeds, events, jobs, schedules, agents, investigations, decisions, archives, and integrations.
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Capture services organized around API clients, auth flows, data normalization, sync orchestration, retries, and backfills.
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AI systems using structured LLM outputs, evals, token budgets, embeddings/vector search, vLLM/local models, and agent workflows.
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React/TypeScript UI surfaces for settings, agent runs, investigations, decisions, and operational workflows.
Qualifications
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8+ years building production backend or full-stack systems, with Staff-level ownership of large or ambiguous technical areas.
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Strong Python experience, including typed code, data modeling, testing, and production debugging.
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Deep experience with relational databases, especially Postgres, schema design, query performance, migrations, and data correctness.
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Experience building distributed or asynchronous systems involving queues, workers, retries, idempotency, rate limits, and failure recovery.
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Strong API integration experience, ideally with OAuth, webhooks, pagination, throttling, vendor-specific edge cases, and long-running backfills.
Benefits
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Competitive compensation
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Comprehensive benefits
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Career success on your terms
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Flexible work environment
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Annual wellness and community outreach days
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Always on recognition for your contributions
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Global collaboration and networking opportunities
How to Apply
Interested? Submit your application along with any supporting information- we can’t wait to hear from you!