Senior Staff Software Development Engineer (Build Engineering)

Zscaler•San Jose, CA

8d•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. Role We are looking for a Senior Staff Software Development Engineer (Build Engineering) to join our team. This is a hybrid role based in San Jose, CA (3 days a week onsite), reporting to the Director, Software Development Engineering in the ZIA Core Engineering department. We are seeking a proactive Senior Staff Software Development Engineer (Build Engineering) to accelerate ZIA's transformation into a modernized, automated CI/CD environment. By taking ownership of critical self-service and automation initiatives, you will help scale a lean infrastructure team to meet high demands and directly elevate the daily productivity and developer experience for several hundred engineers.

Requirements

8+ years of experience designing and deploying large-scale infrastructure in public clouds (e.g., AWS, GCP) with expert-level proficiency in IaC tools (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation)
Expert understanding of the end-to-end SDLC, Linux systems, kernel-level concepts, and complex software compilation and packaging processes
Proven ability to programmatically build and scale CI/CD pipelines, utilizing strong programming expertise in Go and/or Python, along with tooling like Jenkins, GitLab, or Temporal
Deep foundational knowledge required to onboard rapidly, understand complex ecosystems, and drive immediate, autonomous contributions

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with, or a strong desire to learn, the Bazel build system, as well as comfortability using AI-assisted coding tools (e.g., Windsurf, Claude) to accelerate delivery
Strong hands-on experience on the FreeBSD platform
Good experience in Hypervisor Platforms like Proxmox, ESXi
Extensive hands-on experience with microservices architecture