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Salary: USD 185,500 - 265,000 / annual
Zscaler is seeking a Principal Software Development Engineer to lead the modernization of the Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) control plane using cloud-native, microservices-based architecture. This is a hybrid role (minimum 3 days per week in Santa Clara, CA office) reporting to the Senior Director, Software Development Engineering.
You will own the technical roadmap to evolve the ZIA control plane with API-first, domain-aligned microservices, clear service ownership, and multi-region architectures supporting active-active, failover, and disaster recovery patterns. You will design, develop, and operate low-latency, event-driven services end-to-end (API through storage) utilizing resilience patterns, progressive delivery strategies (blue/green, canary, feature flags), GitOps workflows (Argo CD/Flux), and safe rollout/rollback mechanisms.
You will drive engineering excellence through establishing standards, code reviews, testing, paved-road patterns, and API/event contract governance (versioning, consumer-driven contracts, schema registry, DLQs). You will partner cross-functionally with Product, SRE, Security, Data, and Architecture teams, representing designs in customer and partner forums.
Owning service reliability and operability end-to-end is critical: you will establish and manage SLIs/SLOs (p95/p99 latency, availability), implement SLO-based alerting, manage error budgets, lead incident response and postmortems, and deploy advanced observability with distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger/Tempo) and structured logging.
You will embed microservices security practices including OAuth2/OIDC, mTLS, service-to-service authorization, and secrets management (KMS/Vault). You will also drive supply-chain integrity (SBOM, SLSA), performance optimization, capacity planning, and cloud spend/autoscaling across AWS primitives.
Zscaler is a NASDAQ-listed company that accelerates digital transformation through its Zero Trust Exchange platform, protecting thousands of customers from cyberattacks and data loss. The platform is distributed across 200+ public data centers globally and thousands of private sites at the edge, making it the world's largest in-line cloud security platform. The company is building an AI-native enterprise where human potential is amplified by machine intelligence.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 12+ years in software development with 4+ years building and operating production microservices at significant scale
- Proficiency in Go
- Deep experience with distributed systems and messaging (Kafka preferred; SQS/RabbitMQ acceptable), including patterns such as CQRS and Event Sourcing where fit-for-purpose
- Kubernetes in AWS at scale (EKS preferred), strong Docker fundamentals, Infrastructure-as-Code, and GitOps workflows
- Strong SQL (PostgreSQL/MySQL/Amazon RDS/Aurora) and NoSQL (Cassandra/MongoDB/DynamoDB) design and scaling with familiarity with multi-region data trade-offs
- Performance engineering and cost optimization in AWS
- Comprehensive reliability and security experience including SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, metrics (Prometheus), tracing (OpenTelemetry), SLO-based alerting, incident management, postmortems, service mesh (Istio/Linkerd), mTLS, OAuth2/OIDC, and secrets management (KMS/Vault)
- Foundational understanding of AI/ML technologies and experience leveraging, securing, or positioning AI-driven solutions to optimize outcomes within your functional domain
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Proven ability to leverage AI technologies and workflows to drive measurable operational efficiency
- Chaos engineering, advanced load/performance testing, fault injection, and disaster recovery drills
- Multi-region design expertise (active-active, partitioning, replication, eventual consistency)
- Migration leadership experience (strangler patterns, domain decomposition)
- Event contract governance (Avro/Protobuf with schema registry), DLQ processing strategies, and data replay tooling
- OSS contributions, technical talks, patents, or published design writing
