Staff Software Development Engineer

Zscaler•San Jose, CA

1d•$212,000 - $265,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Zscaler is seeking an exceptional and technically grounded Senior Manager, Software Development Engineering to lead their core Data Loss Prevention (DLP) engineering team within the Zero Trust Exchange department. This role, based in San Jose, CA, involves leading the architecture, design, and delivery of high-throughput, low-latency DLP engines, dictionary matching systems, and intelligent content inspection pipelines. The position requires balancing strategic leadership with deep systems rigor, integrating deterministic inspection mechanisms with next-generation Named Entity Recognition (NER) and ML models, while managing real-time inline performance trade-offs. The company emphasizes a future of work that is Human + AI, aiming to amplify human potential with machine intelligence to solve complex security challenges. Zscaler's culture is driven by customer obsession, a commitment to mission and each other, and core behaviors of ownership, collaboration, trust through outcomes, and a challenge culture with ongoing feedback.

Requirements

Demonstrated curiosity and active exploration of AI tools, with a proven history of integrating new technologies to enhance daily workflows and augment problem-solving
8+ years of experience with systems software engineering including 2+ years of leadership experience building and managing high-performing software teams
Practical understanding of Named Entity Recognition (NER) models and their runtime limitations in high-throughput data paths
Advanced hands-on proficiency in C programming on Linux or FreeBSD runtime environments
Deep architectural expertise in Inter-Process Communication (IPC), shared memory architectures, and POSIX concurrency primitives
Expert-level proficiency in production troubleshooting and root-cause analysis, including post-mortem core dump analysis, GDB/LLDB debugging, Valgrind, and system-level performance tracing (eBPF or DTrace)
Deep technical domain expertise in Data Loss Prevention (DLP) technologies, including regex evaluation engines, dictionary compilers, EDM/IDM profiles, and end-to-end incident streaming and forensics pipelines

Nice To Haves

Proven ability to leverage AI technologies and workflows to drive measurable operational efficiency
Experience porting, profiling, or optimizing AI/ML inference workloads, such as ONNX Runtime, TensorRT, or custom quantized NER models
Hands-on background developing inline network proxies, deep packet inspection (DPI) engines, AVX instructions, or Hyperscan
Direct experience with FreeBSD kernel internals (jails, network stack, VFS/ZFS)
Track record of driving automated regression testing and CI/CD pipelines for distributed systems

Responsibilities

Manage, mentor, and grow a world-class team of systems software engineers and principal architects responsible for high-performance DLP engines, dictionary compilers, and distributed incident processing pipelines
Own the technical direction and engineering execution for line-rate pattern matching, regular expression evaluators, custom dictionary compilers, exact data match (EDM), and indexed document matching (IDM) running in production proxy runtimes
Guide the evaluation, operationalization, and performance boundary testing of Named Entity Recognition (NER) and ML models, balancing inspection accuracy and tokenization against strict network latency, compute complexity, and memory footprints
Maintain exacting standards for multi-threaded C daemons on FreeBSD/Linux, architecting robust shared memory structures, high-performance Inter-Process Communication (IPC), lockless concurrency, and memory-safe subsystems
Serve as the technical escalation authority for critical production issues—championing post-mortem core dump analysis, system profiling, and leak detection—while overseeing scalable DLP incident streaming, forensic logging, and enterprise SIEM/SOAR integrations