Staff Software Development Engineer (Microservices)

About the Position

We are looking for a Staff Software Development Engineer (Microservices) to join our team. This is a hybrid role based in Santa Clara, CA (in office minimum 3 days per week), reporting to the Senior Director, Software Development Engineering in the Engineering ZIA Core department. You will build, operate, and continuously improve domain-aligned microservices for the Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) control plane while owning services end to end from design through deployment to help the team evolve toward a cloud-native architecture at scale.

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) while contributing 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 while shipping 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, and 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 while elevating 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

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, with proficiency in Go and solid software engineering fundamentals (testing, design, code quality)
• Kubernetes experience (EKS preferred), strong Docker fundamentals, experience delivering services in AWS, and 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), and experience with at least one NoSQL store (e.g., Cassandra/MongoDB/DynamoDB)
• Observability expertise across metrics (Prometheus), logs, and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), alongside practical incident management experience
• Working knowledge of service security (OAuth2/OIDC), mTLS, and secrets management (e.g., KMS/Vault)

Nice to Have

• 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, alongside familiarity with service mesh (Istio/Linkerd) and policy-driven traffic management
• Experience with chaos engineering, fault injection, or DR drills, combined with exposure to multi-region patterns, data consistency tradeoffs, and contributions to monolith-to-microservices migrations
• Performance profiling and cloud cost optimization in AWS with basic FinOps awareness, plus OSS contributions, technical talks, or high-quality technical writing

We Offer

• Competitive salary range: $133,000 - $190,000 USD
• Comprehensive and inclusive benefits program
• Various health plans
• Time off plans for vacation and sick time
• Parental leave options
• Retirement options
• Education reimbursement
• In-office perks, and more!

About the Company

Zscaler (NASDAQ: ZS) accelerates digital transformation so customers can be more agile, efficient, resilient, and secure. The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform protects thousands of customers from cyberattacks and data loss by securely connecting users, devices, and applications in any location. Distributed across 200+ public data centers globally and thousands of private sites at the edge, the SASE-based Zero Trust Exchange is the world’s largest in-line cloud security platform.

We believe the future of work is Human + AI and are building an AI-native enterprise where human potential is amplified by machine intelligence to solve the world’s hardest security challenges. Driven by deep customer obsession, we are committed to the mission, outcome, and to each other. We bring these commitments to life through three core behaviors: ownership and collaboration, trust through outcomes and impact, and a challenge culture with ongoing feedback.

Ready to make an impact at the company pioneering security transformation in the AI era? Join us at Zscaler.