National AI Awards 2025Discover AI's trailblazers! Join us to celebrate innovation and nominate industry leaders.

Nominate & Attend

Machine Learning Scientist

Proofpoint
Belfast
1 month ago
Create job alert

It's fun to work in a company where people truly BELIEVE in what they're doing!

We're committed to bringing passion and customer focus to the business.

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. Proofpoint.

The Role

Proofpoint is looking for a Machine Learning Scientist to join the Algo team within the Tessian Business Unit. In this role, your key responsibility will be to analyse data, build ML models and improve algorithms at the core of our email threat detection engine that protects some of the largest businesses in the world. You will collaborate with Product and Engineering teams to identify and solve the most impactful problems applying state-of-the-art machine learning tools and techniques. You'll be surrounded by incredibly smart, talented and friendly colleagues. Engineers at Tessian love to learn from each other and pull together as a team to succeed.

*This is a Hybrid role; Cork or Belfast.

Your day-to-day

-Wrangle and draw meaningful insights from massive amounts of unstructured textual data using the latest tools and technologies like Spark, Iceberg, Athena, AWS SageMaker

-Apply unsupervised learning algorithms across billions of email interactions to identify emerging threat patterns

-Work with state-of-the-art machine learning models and techniques like encoder-decoder transformers, LLMs, anomaly detection as well as classical ML models to solve a multifaceted problem

-Engineer new features, train and deploy models to production using AWS SageMaker as the MLOps platform

-Adopt a data-driven approach to identify gaps in our detection algorithms and propose improvements to our models and algorithms

-Promote and drive ML best practices and cultivate an environment of experimentation and learning

-Stay up to date with the latest advancements in machine learning, AI technologies, and incorporate them into our solutions where applicable

What you bring to the team

Essential

-Experience contributing to multiple highly impactful machine learning projects with proven results

-Hands-on experience in the NLP domain involving training, fine-tuning and productionising transformer-based models for text classification / text-embeddings (experience with LLMs, generative AI is a plus)

-Experience monitoring and maintaining performance of models over time in production considering model/data drifts In-depth experience with one or more deep neural network frameworks (e.g. PyTorch, Tensorflow, JAX)

-A creative mindset, propensity to care deeply about the impact their team has and to encourage novel ways of critical thinking in their team

Good to have

-Conceptual understanding of Graph Neural Networks and experience applying GNNs to solve real world problem statements will be a plus

-Experience working on large imbalanced datasets, evaluating and selecting models that work well in production on imbalanced real-world data

Why Proofpoint
Protecting people is at the heart of our award-winning lineup of cybersecurity solutions, and the people who work here are the key to our success. We’re a customer-focused and a driven-to-win organization with leading-edge products. We are an inclusive, diverse, multinational company that believes in culture fit, but more importantly ‘culture-add’, and we strongly encourage people from all walks of life to apply.

We believe in hiring the best and the brightest to help cultivate our culture of collaboration and appreciation. Apply today and explore your future at Proofpoint! #LifeAtProofpoint

#LI-Hybrid

If you like wild growth and working with happy, enthusiastic over-achievers, you'll enjoy your career with us!

Related Jobs

View all jobs

Machine Learning Scientist

Machine Learning Scientist

Machine Learning Scientist

Machine Learning Scientist

Machine Learning Scientist III (Metasearch bidding)

Director, Machine Learning Science - Recommendations & Relevance

National AI Awards 2025

Subscribe to Future Tech Insights for the latest jobs & insights, direct to your inbox.

By subscribing, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of service.

Industry Insights

Discover insightful articles, industry insights, expert tips, and curated resources.

10 AI Recruitment Agencies in the UK You Should Know (2025 Job‑Seeker Guide)

Generative‑AI hype has translated into real hiring: Lightcast recorded +57 % year‑on‑year growth in UK adverts mentioning “machine learning”, “LLM” or “gen‑AI” during Q1 2025. Yet supply still lags. Roughly 18,000 core AI professionals work in the UK, but monthly live vacancies hover around 1,400–1,600. That mismatch makes specialist recruiters invaluable—opening stealth vacancies, advising on salary bands and fast‑tracking interview loops. But many tech agencies sprinkle “AI” on their website without an active desk. To save you time, we vetted 50 + consultancies and kept only those with: A registered UK head office (verified via Companies House). A named AI/Machine‑Learning or Data practice.

AI Jobs Skills Radar 2026: Emerging Frameworks, Languages & Tools to Learn Now

As the UK’s AI sector accelerates towards a £1 trillion tech economy, the job landscape is rapidly evolving. Whether you’re an aspiring AI engineer, a machine learning specialist, or a data-driven software developer, staying ahead of the curve means more than just brushing up on Python. You’ll need to master a new generation of frameworks, languages, and tools shaping the future of artificial intelligence. Welcome to the AI Jobs Skills Radar 2026—your definitive guide to the emerging AI tech stack that employers will be looking for in the next 12–24 months. Updated annually for accuracy and relevance, this guide breaks down the top tools, frameworks, platforms, and programming languages powering the UK’s most in-demand AI careers.

How to Find Hidden AI Jobs in the UK Using Professional Bodies like BCS, IET & the Turing Society

Stop Scrolling Job Boards and Start Tapping the Real AI Market Every week a new headline announces millions of pounds flowing into artificial-intelligence research, defence initiatives, or health-tech pilots. Read the news and you could be forgiven for thinking that AI vacancies must be everywhere—just grab your laptop, open LinkedIn, and pick a role. Yet anyone who has hunted seriously for an AI job in the United Kingdom knows the truth is messier. A large percentage of worthwhile AI positions—especially specialist or senior posts—never appear on public boards. They emerge inside university–industry consortia, defence labs, NHS data-science teams, climate-tech start-ups, and venture studios. Most are filled through referral or conversation long before a recruiter drafts a formal advert. If you wait for a vacancy link, you are already at the back of the queue. The surest way to beat that dynamic is to embed yourself in the professional bodies and grassroots communities where the work is conceived. The UK has a dense network of such organisations: the Chartered Institute for IT (BCS); the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) with its Artificial Intelligence Technical Network; the Alan Turing Institute and its student-driven Turing Society; the Royal Statistical Society (RSS); the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) and its Mechatronics, Informatics & Control Group; public-funding engines like UK Research and Innovation (UKRI); and an ecosystem of Slack channels and Meetup groups that trade genuine, timely intel. This article is a practical, step-by-step guide to using those networks. You will learn: Why professional bodies matter more than algorithmic job boards Exactly which special-interest groups (SIGs) and technical networks to join How to turn CPD events into informal interviews How to monitor grant databases so you hear about posts months before they exist Concrete scripts, portfolio tactics, and outreach rhythms that convert visibility into offers Follow the playbook and you move from passive applicant to insider—the colleague who hears about a role before it is written down.