Sr Engineering Manager, API Platform

Zscaler•Santa Clara, CA

14h•$212,000 - $265,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Zscaler is seeking a Sr. Engineering Manager, API Platform to lead the API Platform team and deliver scalable, secure, high-performing platforms and systems that empower engineering teams. The role focuses on platform efficiency, scalability, and developer experience, while managing senior technical talent. It is a hybrid role based in the Santa Clara, California office three days per week and reports to the Sr. Director for the API Platform team. The manager will set the vision and roadmap for API Platform and developer tooling, guide API design and governance, and oversee architecture and standards for product and provisioning APIs. The role also leads delivery of reliable microservices, workflow workers, and SDKs, and partners with Product Management and Security. The team emphasizes shared ownership so architectural work, dataset design, and foundational services can be maintained and debugged collaboratively in production.

Requirements

Demonstrated curiosity and active exploration of AI tools, with a history of integrating new technologies to enhance workflows and problem-solving.
At least 8 years of experience as an engineering leader, including at least 3 years managing technical teams for developer tooling, API platforms, or cloud-based systems across multi-language ecosystems including Java, Go, and JavaScript.
At least 10 years of overall software engineering experience.
Hands-on proficiency designing APIs and SDKs for containerized environments such as Kubernetes and Docker.
Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts, including caching, queues, and pub/sub architectures, and cloud-service experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure.
Advanced understanding of API-first design principles and standards, including OpenAPI/Swagger, REST, JSON, and Authn/z.

Nice To Haves

Practical experience and proficiency applying modern AI tools to the software development lifecycle.
Experience in the Cloud Security and Networking domain.
Experience driving engineering practices for workflow automation and developer productivity using open-source or proprietary tools.
Advocacy for modern engineering practices such as DevSecOps, CI/CD, and Infrastructure-as-Code across large engineering organizations.

Responsibilities

Lead the vision and roadmap for the API Platform and developer tooling, aligning it with organizational goals, technical scalability, and industry best practices.
Oversee API standardization, design, and governance to improve developer experience and productivity across engineering teams and products.
Direct architecture and standards for product and provisioning APIs, ensuring state changes across distributed services are reliable, reproducible, and traceable.
Manage and coach Senior Staff Engineers and other technical contributors, fostering collaboration and professional growth.
Ensure delivery of reliable and available microservices, workflow workers, and SDKs with safe retry semantics across Java, Go, and Python, using gRPC, Temporal, Postgres, and Redis.
Partner with Product Management and Security to develop scalable, secure solutions that meet business objectives.
Promote shared ownership by reducing knowledge silos and ensuring collaborative development of architectural work, dataset design, and foundational services that the team can maintain and debug in production.