Sr. Staff Platform Engineer- Kubernetes

Zscaler•San Jose, WA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

About Zscaler Zscaler accelerates digital transformation so our customers can be more agile, efficient, resilient, and secure. Our cloud native Zero Trust Exchange platform protects thousands of 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 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 make a positive difference on a global scale, we invite you to bring your talents to Zscaler and help shape the future of cybersecurity. We are looking for a Sr. Staff Platform Engineer to join our team. This is a Hybrid role based in San Jose, CA or Bellevue, WA (3 days in office), reporting to the Senior Manager, Software Development Engineering within the Zero Trust Exchange department. As a Sr. Staff Platform Engineer, you’ll lead our multi-tenant Kubernetes platform across regions and sovereign environments—owning design, reliability, and security. You’ll set technical standards, ensure critical uptime and performance, and build automation that helps teams ship quickly and confidently at global scale. What you’ll do (Role Expectations) Own architecture and lifecycle of multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters across public and sovereign environments, delivering 99.999% uptime with multi-region HA, failover, DR, scaling, and security hardening Build and automate platform capabilities using Go operators, GitOps, Helm, and Terraform while defining standards for networking, RBAC, policies, quotas, and multi-tenancy isolation Lead observability and performance initiatives using Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry to drive cost efficiency and manage SLOs Drive supply chain and runtime security through Sigstore, SBOMs, and OPA while operating safe CI/CD rollouts with automated change management Troubleshoot complex production issues across control and data planes, lead incident postmortems, mentor engineers, and evaluate emerging technologies like Cilium and eBPF Who You Are (Success Profile) You thrive in ambiguity. You're comfortable building the path as you walk it. You thrive in a dynamic environment, seeing ambiguity not as a hindrance, but as the raw material to build something meaningful. You act like an owner. Your passion for the mission fuels your bias for action. You operate with integrity because you genuinely care about the outcome. You adapt to what’s needed, navigating seamlessly between high-level strategy and hands-on execution. You are a problem-solver. You seek out challenges because you are energized by finding solutions, knowing that solving the hard problems delivers the biggest impact. You are customer-obsessed. You build deep empathy for the customer—both internal and external—and anchor your decisions in solving their real-world problems. You champion their needs from start to finish, knowing their success is our success. You operate with urgency. You understand that in a high-growth environment, speed and quality are not mutually exclusive. You have a relentless focus on execution and a bias for action, delivering high-impact results quickly to win for the customer and the team.

Requirements

8+ years in platform/infra engineering with 5+ years operating Kubernetes in production at multi-cluster, multi-region scale
Deep hands-on knowledge of Kubernetes internals and operations, including control plane components, etcd health, scheduling, HPA/VPA, Cluster Autoscaler, and upgrade strategies
Strong proficiency in Go and Python for building operators, controllers, CLI tools, and automation
Expertise in cloud networking and service connectivity, including CNI, Ingress/Gateway API, Istio, and observability stacks like Prometheus and Grafana
Proven leadership of complex platform initiatives with rigorous IaC/GitOps practices, security-first architecture, and a Bachelor’s in CS/Engineering or related field

Nice To Haves

Multi-cloud operations across AWS/GCP/Azure including EKS/GKE/AKS, hybrid/on‑prem setups, and experience in sovereign or regulated environments
Experience with performance, storage, and networking at scale, including kernel tuning, backup/restore/DR, eBPF/Cilium, and zero trust implementation
Contributions to CNCF/open source projects or published technical talks and papers

Responsibilities

Own architecture and lifecycle of multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters across public and sovereign environments, delivering 99.999% uptime with multi-region HA, failover, DR, scaling, and security hardening
Build and automate platform capabilities using Go operators, GitOps, Helm, and Terraform while defining standards for networking, RBAC, policies, quotas, and multi-tenancy isolation
Lead observability and performance initiatives using Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry to drive cost efficiency and manage SLOs
Drive supply chain and runtime security through Sigstore, SBOMs, and OPA while operating safe CI/CD rollouts with automated change management
Troubleshoot complex production issues across control and data planes, lead incident postmortems, mentor engineers, and evaluate emerging technologies like Cilium and eBPF