DevOps Engineer Intern – AI Forge (AI/ML Platform)

About Us 

Proofpoint is a global leader in human- and agent-centric cybersecurity. We protect how people, data, and AI agents connect across email, cloud, and collaboration tools. Over 80 of the Fortune 100, 10,000 large enterprises, and millions of smaller organizations trust Proofpoint to stop threats, prevent data loss, and build resilience across their people and AI workflows. Our mission is simple: safeguard the digital world and empower people to work securely and confidently. 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  

About the Team  

AI Forge is an internal machine learning group that consults across Proofpoint's entire product portfolio. We are a group of data scientists and engineers who love keeping up with the latest ML research, fostering a collaborative and creative workplace, and solving challenging problems. Over the past several years, we have developed data-driven product features, leveraging a range of model architectures from tree-based models to state-of-the-art transformers. The projects have spanned the full range of modern ML techniques (deep and classical learning), approaches (supervised and unsupervised learning) and data types (textual, image, and structured data). Each new project surfaces novel puzzles to be solved, while production deployments to our cloud AI/ML Platform expose new MLOps challenges. Recently, our organization has been spearheading company-wide initiatives around large language models and their application to the business. This work includes creating shared resources, building LLM-powered applications and agentic systems, accelerating internal teams through reusable services and tooling, and organizing hack days.  

What You’ll Do 

As a DevOps Engineer Intern, you will support the AI Forge Platform team in building and maintaining infrastructure and shared services that enable ML development and production deployment across Proofpoint. 

You will: 

• Contribute to Python-based tooling that powers shared AI platform services and internal automation 

• Assist in developing and maintaining reusable infrastructure modules (Terraform) used across ML workloads 

• Support shared CI/CD pipelines that standardize how models and AI services are built, tested, and deployed 

• Help improve internal platform services that accelerate AI integration for product teams 

• Assist in containerizing and deploying ML and LLM-powered applications into standardized environments 

• Contribute to monitoring, logging, and alerting for shared AI services to improve reliability and uptime 

• Support secure integration patterns between AI services and proprietary data sources 

• Collaborate with data scientists and product teams to productionize models using shared platform capabilities 

• Contribute to documentation that enables teams to self-serve AI infrastructure and tooling 

This role provides hands-on exposure to building reusable platform capabilities rather than one-off deployments, helping scale AI adoption across the organization. 

What You’ll Learn 

• How production ML systems are deployed, monitored, and operated 

• Core MLOps concepts (model lifecycle, reproducibility, deployment strategies) 

• Cloud infrastructure patterns for scalable AI systems 

• CI/CD design for infrastructure and ML workloads 

• Security considerations when supporting AI systems and proprietary data 

• Best practices for documentation, collaboration, and operational excellence 

What You Need 

• Currently pursuing a degree in Computer Science or a related field (graduation date between fall 2026 and spring 2027) 

• Strong fundamentals in programming (Python preferred) 

• Familiarity with Linux/Unix environments and Git workflows 

• Basic understanding of cloud computing concepts 

• Interest in DevOps, platform engineering, and AI/ML systems 

• Strong written and verbal communication skills 

• Ability to learn quickly and collaborate effectively within a team 

What Will Help 

• Exposure to Docker or Kubernetes 

• Familiarity with Terraform or other Infrastructure as Code tools 

• Coursework or projects involving ML or AI systems 

• Interest in large language models or modern AI tooling 

• Awareness of security best practices in cloud environments 

Why This Internship Is Unique 

• Direct exposure to real production AI and LLM systems 

• Experience working on shared AI services that impact multiple product teams 

• Hands-on involvement in secure cloud infrastructure supporting sensitive data 

• Mentorship from engineers building scalable AI platforms