Staff Software Development Engineer (Microservices)

Zscaler•Santa Clara, CA

19h•$133,000 - $190,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Zscaler is looking for a Staff Software Development Engineer (Microservices) to join their team. This is a hybrid role based in Santa Clara, CA, requiring a minimum of 3 days per week in the office. The role reports to the Senior Director, Software Development Engineering in the Engineering ZIA Core department. The engineer will be responsible for building, operating, and continuously improving domain-aligned microservices for the Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) control plane. This includes owning services end-to-end from design through deployment, contributing to the team's evolution towards a cloud-native architecture at scale.

Requirements

Foundational understanding of AI/ML technologies and experience leveraging, securing, or positioning AI-driven solutions to optimize outcomes within your functional domain.
5+ years in software development, including 2+ years building and operating production microservices.
Proficiency in Go and solid software engineering fundamentals (testing, design, code quality).
Kubernetes experience (EKS preferred), strong Docker fundamentals.
Experience delivering services in AWS.
Familiarity with Git-based workflows, CI/CD, and common autoscaling and rollout patterns.
Messaging and data store experience with Kafka or a similar broker.
Strong SQL proficiency (PostgreSQL/MySQL/Amazon RDS/Aurora).
Experience with at least one NoSQL store (e.g., Cassandra/MongoDB/DynamoDB).
Observability expertise across metrics (Prometheus), logs, and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry).
Practical incident management experience.
Working knowledge of service security (OAuth2/OIDC), mTLS, and secrets management (e.g., KMS/Vault).

Nice To Haves

Proven ability to leverage AI technologies and workflows to drive measurable operational efficiency.
Hands-on GitOps (Argo CD/Flux), feature flags, and progressive delivery at scale.
Familiarity with service mesh (Istio/Linkerd) and policy-driven traffic management.
Experience with chaos engineering, fault injection, or DR drills.
Exposure to multi-region patterns, data consistency tradeoffs.
Contributions to monolith-to-microservices migrations.
Performance profiling and cloud cost optimization in AWS with basic FinOps awareness.
OSS contributions, technical talks, or high-quality technical writing.

Responsibilities

Build and operate low-latency, event-driven microservices end to end (API through storage) using resilience patterns (circuit breakers, retries with jitter, back-pressure, idempotency, sagas/outbox).
Contribute to multi-region readiness through sound data partitioning, stateless design, and blast-radius reduction.
Implement paved-road patterns for service development, CI/CD, testing, and delivery by contributing to shared libraries, templates, and runbooks.
Ship safely via GitOps workflows (e.g., Argo CD/Flux), progressive delivery (canary/blue-green, feature flags), and automated rollback policies.
Instrument services with metrics, logs, and distributed tracing, define and track SLIs/SLOs.
Actively participate in incident response, on-call rotations, failure-tested runbooks, and postmortems.
Collaborate with Product, SRE, Security, and Architecture on designs, tradeoffs, design reviews, and clear technical docs/ADRs.
Elevate service security (OAuth2/OIDC, mTLS, service-to-service authZ, secrets management) and supply-chain integrity.
Profile performance, guide capacity planning and autoscaling, and help optimize cloud cost for owned services.