Staff Software Development Engineer

Zscaler•Santa Clara, CA

About The Position

Zscaler is seeking a Staff Software Development Engineer to lead the design and development of scalable, resilient, and secure control plane platform services for its Zero Trust Exchange. The role will drive architecture, influence technical strategy across teams, and deliver platform capabilities that improve reliability, operability, and developer velocity. It is based in Santa Clara, California, and reports to the Senior Director, Software Development Engineering in the Zero Trust Exchange department. The successful candidate will combine deep distributed systems expertise with cross-functional leadership and a pragmatic, execution-focused approach. The role includes leading architectural and delivery efforts, resolving system and reliability issues, setting engineering standards, mentoring senior engineers, and evaluating emerging technologies—including Agentic AI and AI-assisted workflows—to improve engineering productivity and product outcomes.

Requirements

At least 5 years of software engineering experience, including significant experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems and backend platform services.
Deep expertise in system design, microservices architecture, API design, data modeling, and operating highly available, fault-tolerant services in production.
Strong proficiency in one or more modern programming languages such as Java, Go, or Python, with a track record of delivering production-grade software.
Experience leading complex technical initiatives across multiple teams, driving architectural decisions, and influencing engineering direction beyond immediate team boundaries.
Strong understanding of cloud-native technologies, observability, reliability engineering, and secure software development practices.
Demonstrated curiosity and active exploration of AI tools, with a history of integrating new technologies to enhance daily workflows and augment problem-solving.

Nice To Haves

Proven ability to leverage AI technologies and workflows to drive measurable operational efficiency.
Experience applying AI-forward engineering practices, such as developer copilots, intelligent automation, AI-assisted incident analysis, or ML/LLM-powered platform capabilities, to improve engineering productivity or product outcomes.
Experience building control plane, policy, identity, security, or other mission-critical platform systems in a SaaS or cybersecurity environment, with Kubernetes, PAM, or IGA.
Experience mentoring senior engineers and serving as a recognized technical leader for architecture, operational excellence, and engineering standards across an organization.

Responsibilities

Lead the architecture, design, and delivery of large-scale control plane and platform services, with a focus on scalability, availability, security, and operational excellence.
Drive complex technical initiatives across teams, align stakeholders on architecture and execution plans, and deliver against business and engineering priorities.
Identify and resolve system bottlenecks, reliability risks, and architectural gaps across distributed systems.
Improve system performance, observability, and long-term maintainability.
Set a high technical bar through design reviews, code reviews, and engineering best practices.
Provide hands-on mentorship to senior engineers across the organization.
Evaluate and apply emerging technologies, including Agentic AI and AI-assisted engineering workflows where appropriate, to improve developer productivity, system intelligence, and product delivery outcomes.