Director, Software Development Engineering

Zscaler•San Jose, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

About Zscaler Zscaler accelerates digital transformation to ensure our customers can be more agile, efficient, resilient, and secure. As an AI-forward enterprise , we are constantly pushing the envelope, leveraging the world’s largest security data lake to power our cloud-native Zero Trust Exchange platform. This innovation protects our customers from cyberattacks and data loss by securely connecting users, devices, and applications in any location. Here, impact in your role matters more than title and trust is built on results. We say, impact over activity. We seek innovators who actively use AI to amplify their impact and who thrive in an environment where we leverage intelligent systems to stay ahead of evolving threats. We believe in transparency and value constructive, honest debate —we’re focused on getting to the best ideas, faster. We build high-performing teams that can make an impact quickly and with high quality. To do this, we are building a culture of execution centered on customer obsession , collaboration, ownership, and accountability. We value high-impact, high-accountability with a sense of urgency where you’re enabled to do your best work and embrace your potential. If you’re driven by purpose, thrive on solving complex challenges, and want to be part of the team that’s helping to secure the AI age, we invite you to bring your talents to Zscaler and help shape the future of cybersecurity. Role We are looking for a Director, Software Engineering to join our team. This is a hybrid role based out of our San Jose HQ (minimum 3 days a week on Tue, Wed, Thu), reporting to the VP, Engineering for the Zero Trust Branch (Zero Trust Exchange) department. In this role, the Director of Software Engineering will lead the gateway/datapath engineering organization, owning the architecture, delivery, and operational excellence of high‑performance, highly reliable traffic processing systems. This role drives the technical strategy and execution for critical dataplane capabilities, ensuring scalable, secure, and observable performance that directly impacts customer experience and platform stability.

Requirements

15+ years of software engineering experience, including 7+ years leading engineering teams delivering complex, production-grade systems
Proven experience building and operating high-performance gateway/datapath or networking systems (e.g., L4–L7 proxies, firewalls, VPN/tunneling, packet processing, routing/switching, traffic steering) with strong fundamentals in performance and reliability
Demonstrated ability to set technical strategy and drive execution across multiple workstreams, with a track record of shipping impactful capabilities on predictable timelines
Strong production ownership experience: operating mission-critical services, driving SLOs/SLIs, incident management, root-cause analysis, and continuous reliability improvements
Excellent cross-functional leadership and communication skills, able to align engineering, product, and operations stakeholders around priorities and tradeoffs

Nice To Haves

Strong experience designing, building, and operating SD-WAN datapaths and control/data plane interactions (overlay networking, tunnel encapsulation, traffic steering, QoS, path selection, failover, and telemetry)
Experience delivering gateway/datapath capabilities in cloud-native, multi-tenant environments, including robust observability and automated safe rollout strategies
Strong experience with routing and switching fundamentals and implementations (e.g., BGP/OSPF, ECMP, VRFs, VLANs) in high-scale production environments

Responsibilities

Set technical direction and architecture for the gateway/datapath, driving scalable, high-performance designs while balancing across considerations such as latency, throughput, resiliency, and cost
Lead and grow the engineering organization, hiring and developing a strong high performing team, and building a culture of accountability, execution, and continuous improvement
Drive delivery of critical dataplane capabilities, translating business priorities into clear roadmaps, milestones, and measurable outcomes, and consistently shipping high-quality releases
Own operational excellence for production systems, improving reliability, observability, incident response, and SLO/SLI discipline to meet availability and performance targets
Partner cross-functionally with Product, QA, Security, SRE, and peer engineering teams to align priorities, manage dependencies, and ensure end-to-end customer impact