Principal DevOps Engineer

Zscaler•San Jose, CA

2h•$185,500 - $265,000•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 Principal DevOps Engineer to join our Zero Trust Exchange team.This is a hybrid role based in San Jose, CA 3 days a week, reporting to the Sr. Manager, Software Engineering. You'll own the day-to-day operational reliability of our Zero Trust Branch platform — building automated onboarding pipelines, maintaining Kubernetes-based infrastructure in AWS (including federal/IL5 environments), and leading on-call incident response through ServiceNow. As we rapidly scale our customer base, you'll be the engineer who ensures our GitOps workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud environments can keep up with that growth.

Requirements

U.S. Citizenship — required for access to federal cloud environments (IL5)
Deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes and AWS — you'll be managing production clusters daily, not just dabbling
Experience with on-call rotations and incident management workflows — you've carried a pager, written runbooks, and driven postmortems

Nice To Haves

Experience building CI/CD and GitOps pipelines (GitLab, ArgoCD, Docker, Makefile) — we rely heavily on automated, repeatable deployments and you'd hit the ground running
Working knowledge of RDBMS/SQL and SSO (SAML/OIDC) — these come up constantly in onboarding and troubleshooting, so familiarity means fewer ramp-up surprises
Exposure to OpenTelemetry (OTEL), CloudFuse, or NIAP/IL5 certification processes — understanding these gives you a head start in our federal environment and observability stack

Responsibilities

Design and automate customer onboarding workflows that reduce provisioning time from days to hours, enabling the team to scale across hundreds of commercial and federal (IL5) tenants
Own and mature the on-call rotation and incident management process in ServiceNow — defining runbooks, escalation paths, and SLOs that drive mean-time-to-resolution down and keep platform availability above target
Build and maintain GitOps-driven CI/CD pipelines using GitLab and ArgoCD to enable safe, repeatable deployments to production Kubernetes clusters, minimizing human error and accelerating release velocity
Proactively identify and eliminate infrastructure reliability risks through monitoring, capacity planning, and automated remediation — catching problems before customers feel them
Establish operational standards and documentation that enable the broader engineering team to self-serve deployments and troubleshooting, reducing bottlenecks on the DevOps team as the organization scales