Sr. Site Reliability Engineer- Federal

Zscaler•Santa Clara, CA

1d•$118,400 - $148,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Zscaler is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (Production Engineer) for its Zero Trust Exchange team. This hybrid role is based in Santa Clara, California, with onsite work three days per week, and reports to the Senior Manager, Site Reliability Engineering. The engineer will own systems-level reliability and performance for high-throughput bare-metal and cloud infrastructure processing tens of billions of daily transactions across a global, multi-region fleet. The role is software-first, combining production-grade code and automation with systems-level operating system, network, and application debugging to keep the fleet operating safely at scale. The position works in partnership with Engineering and Networking teams to maintain availability across Linux/BSD fleets, Kubernetes clusters, and custom routing stacks; lead incident response; automate infrastructure workflows; operate telemetry systems; define SLOs and error budgets; and improve operability through architectural reviews, upgrades, tuning, and CI/CD validation. The successful candidate is comfortable working through ambiguity, takes ownership, solves challenging problems, collaborates with candor and respect, and actively seeks feedback and development.

Requirements

U.S. citizenship is required due to the nature of assigned customers.
Foundational understanding of AI/ML technologies and experience leveraging, securing, or positioning AI-driven solutions to optimize outcomes within the candidate’s functional domain.
At least 3 years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Production Engineering, or Systems Engineering operating high-scale, low-latency production platforms.
Ability to write and debug executable code live in Python, Go, or Bash, covering core logic and data structures.
Hands-on experience writing Ansible playbooks and tasks for infrastructure automation.
Deep knowledge of Linux operating system internals and kernel troubleshooting, including inodes, open file descriptors, process states, and analyzing df versus du storage discrepancies.
Comprehensive understanding of networking protocols and packet-level analysis, including DNS resolution workflows, TLS handshakes, TCP/IP mechanics, and packet captures using tcpdump.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience operating and managing FreeBSD/BSD operating systems in production.
Expertise running, scaling, and troubleshooting Kubernetes clusters in high-traffic, low-latency environments.
Experience with workflow orchestration platforms such as Temporal or similar.
Deep experience with Prometheus/OpenTelemetry ecosystems, or experience leveraging AI/ML frameworks or AIOps tools for automated root-cause analysis.

Responsibilities

Maintain high availability across large-scale bare-metal Linux/BSD fleets, Kubernetes clusters, and custom routing stacks in partnership with Engineering and Networking teams.
Lead full-cycle incident response and conduct cross-stack troubleshooting using low-level operating system and network tools.
Automate infrastructure lifecycle management, service provisioning, configuration workflows, and release deployments using Ansible, Python, and Go.
Measure operational toil and convert recurring manual work into durable, version-controlled, testable automation, tracking toil reduction as an engineering outcome.
Own end-to-end metrics, logs, and traces using Prometheus and OpenTelemetry ecosystems.
Define and enforce SLOs and error budgets to reduce alert noise.
Perform architectural reviews, operating system and kernel upgrades, capacity planning, and performance tuning.
Enforce strict CI/CD validation before production rollouts.
Build operability standards—including telemetry, rollback safety, and SLO readiness—into service design.