Principal Software Development Engineer

Zscaler•San Jose, CA

2d•$185,500 - $265,000•Hybrid

About The Position

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. We’re looking for a Principal Software Development Engineer to join our team. Based out of our San Jose headquarters (Hybrid 3 days/week) or available as a remote opportunity within the Pacific Timezone, you will report to the Senior Manager, Software Engineering within the Zero Trust Exchange department. As a Principal Software Engineer you will build the backend systems that keep the product fast, reliable, and able to scale as usage grows. You will create microservices and event-driven workflows, and ensure data can be ingested and queried efficiently across relational, graph, and time-series databases. You will also drive cross-team execution by collaborating closely with multiple groups to deliver high-quality results on tight timelines.

Requirements

12+ years of experience in backend engineering designing and shipping highly scalable microservices in production developed in Go
Proven experience with event-driven, asynchronous architectures using messaging/streaming platforms such as Kafka
Strong data engineering and persistence skills building efficient ingest and query patterns across relational databases (MySQL) plus at least one of ElasticSearch or Neo4J
Hands-on experience running services on Kubernetes (ideally EKS), including deployment, troubleshooting, and operational ownership

Nice To Haves

Proven ability to profile and optimize distributed systems end-to-end (latency, throughput, resource usage), including performance tuning across services, databases, and messaging
Strong track record designing debuggability/observability for distributed applications—structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and actionable dashboards/alerts for rapid incident triage
Experience defining and operationalizing SLIs/SLOs (error budgets, alert policies, reliability reporting) and driving product decisions based on measured service health

Responsibilities

Architect and deliver scalable microservices on EKS (GoLang): design, build, and operate production services that meet uptime, latency, and scale goals
Build event-driven pipelines with Kafka and MQTT: implement asynchronous workflows that are resilient, observable, and easy to evolve as product needs change
Design high-performance data models and access patterns: optimize ingest and querying across RDS MySQL, Neo4J, and ElasticSearch for correctness, speed, and cost efficiency
Harden production readiness and operational excellence: establish monitoring, alerting, tracing, and on-call standards; drive root-cause fixes and reliability improvements
Lead cross-team delivery and technical direction: align stakeholders, break down complex work, and execute quickly while maintaining a high bar for quality and security