SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 180,000 - 225,000 / annual
Zscaler is seeking a Staff Applied AI Engineer to join the IT/Data Strategy department, reporting to the Manager of Applied AI Engineering. This is a hybrid role based in San Jose, California with remote (US) flexibility.
You will be a senior, hands-on AI builder embedded with business teams to transform ambiguous, high-stakes ideas into secure, production-grade AI solutions. Beyond engineering, you will act as a trusted transformation advisor—running discovery with business leaders, shaping roadmaps, guiding Build/Partner/Buy decisions, and building alongside stakeholders.
Key responsibilities include:
- Partner with business leaders and product owners from discovery through delivery to map workflows, identify high-value AI opportunities, shape roadmaps, and advise on technical feasibility, cost, and risk
- Design and ship secure, production-grade AI solutions across retrieval-augmented generation, structured data querying, unstructured data mining, and agentic workflows, integrating them with core systems of record
- Bring a product-ownership mindset to deployments by establishing monitoring and evaluation frameworks, implementing least-privilege access, and managing ROI, cost attribution, and support plans
- Set engineering standards by expanding reusable building blocks, reference architectures, skills, and engineering playbooks while mentoring team members
You thrive in ambiguity and view dynamic, complex environments as opportunities to build meaningful solutions from the ground up. You act like an owner with a strong bias for action, operating with integrity and navigating seamlessly between high-level strategy and hands-on execution. You are a high-trust collaborator who embraces a feedback-rich culture, delivering candid insights with clarity and respect. You are driven by innovation with deep curiosity for complex technical challenges and a passion for building scalable, secure solutions. You are a pragmatic builder obsessed with shipping high-quality work, balancing technical excellence with rapid delivery of real business value.
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 by securely connecting users, devices, and applications. The platform is distributed across 160+ public exchanges globally and thousands of private exchanges at the edge.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 3 years working directly on AI and/or ML projects
- Hands-on experience across modern AI architecture components, including retrieval methods, reusable skill development, agentic orchestration, Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration, and agent-to-agent (A2A) frameworks
- Proven track record of direct collaboration with business stakeholders to run discovery, translate ambiguous needs into actionable plans, and communicate trade-offs, risk, cost, performance, and architecture
- Demonstrated experience securing AI systems and underlying data, including least-privilege access controls and defending against prompt injection, data leakage, and non-compliant outputs
- Strong engineering foundation proficiency in Python, with experience deploying AI at scale on major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), integrating across APIs, relational/vector databases, and enterprise systems, and monitoring production drift and failure modes
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Familiarity with memory management and long-term context architectures for AI agents
- Direct experience with graph-based knowledge systems
- Experience building automated evaluation frameworks such as LLM-as-judge methodologies or regression testing at-scale for AI quality
