Staff Software Development Engineer (Microservices)

About the role

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.

Role

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.

What you'll do (Role Expectations)

• 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

Who You Are (Success Profile)

• You act like an owner. You operate with a strong bias for action and accountability, navigating seamlessly between hands-on coding, technical design, and production operations.
• You are a pragmatic builder. You are passionate about creating, iterating, and shipping resilient software, balancing technical excellence with speed to deliver measurable outcomes.
• You champion simplicity. You excel at distilling complex distributed systems challenges into simple, robust, and maintainable cloud-native solutions.
• You are a high-trust collaborator. You work cross-functionally with Product, SRE, and Security teams, giving and receiving feedback to build trust and elevate team engineering standards.
• You think at scale. You design systems built to last, connecting day-to-day microservices engineering to high-availability, multi-region architecture and company-wide reliability goals.

What We're Looking for (Minimum Qualifications)

• 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)

What Will Make You Stand Out (Preferred Qualifications)

• 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

#LI-KM #LI-Hybrid

Pay and benefits

Zscaler's salary ranges are benchmarked and are determined by role and level. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations and could be higher or lower based on a multitude of factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

The base salary range listed for this full-time position excludes commission/ bonus/ equity (if applicable) + benefits.

Base Pay Range $133,000—$190,000 USD

At Zscaler, we are committed to building a team that reflects the communities we serve and the customers we work with. We foster an inclusive environment that values all backgrounds and perspectives, emphasizing collaboration and belonging. Join us in our mission to make doing business seamless and secure.

Our Benefits program is one of the most important ways we support our employees. Zscaler proudly offers comprehensive and inclusive benefits to meet the diverse needs of our employees and their families throughout their life stages, including:

• Various health plans
• Time off plans for vacation and sick time
• Parental leave options
• Retirement options
• Education reimbursement
• In-office perks, and more!

By applying for this role, you adhere to applicable laws, regulations, and Zscaler policies, including those related to security and privacy standards and guidelines.

Pay Transparency

Zscaler complies with all applicable federal, state, and local pay transparency rules.

Zscaler is committed to providing reasonable support (called accommodations or adjustments) in our recruiting processes for candidates who are differently abled, have long term conditions, mental health conditions or sincerely held religious beliefs, or who are neurodivergent or require pregnancy-related support.