Senior Staff Software Development Engineer (Platform Engineering)

Senior Staff Software Development Engineer (Build Engineering)

San Jose, California, USA

Zscaler accelerates digital transformation to ensure our customers can be more agile, efficient, resilient, and secure. As an AI-forward enterprise, we are constantly pushing the envelope, leveraging the world's largest security data lake to power our cloud-native Zero Trust Exchange platform. This innovation protects our customers from cyberattacks and data loss by securely connecting users, devices, and applications in any location.

Here, impact in your role matters more than title and trust is built on results. We say, impact over activity. We seek innovators who actively use AI to amplify their impact and who thrive in an environment where we leverage intelligent systems to stay ahead of evolving threats. We believe in transparency and value constructive, honest debate—we're focused on getting to the best ideas, faster. We build high-performing teams that can make an impact quickly and with high quality. To do this, we are building a culture of execution centered on customer obsession, collaboration, ownership, and accountability.

We value high-impact, high-accountability with a sense of urgency where you're enabled to do your best work and embrace your potential. If you're driven by purpose, thrive on solving complex challenges, and want to be part of the team that's helping to secure the AI age, we invite you to bring your talents to Zscaler and help shape the future of cybersecurity.

Role

We are looking for a Senior Staff Software Development Engineer (Build Engineering) to join our team. This is a hybrid role based in San Jose, CA (3 days a week onsite), reporting to the Director, Software Development Engineering in the ZIA Core Engineering department.

We are seeking a proactive Senior Staff Software Development Engineer (Build Engineering) to accelerate ZIA's transformation into a modernized, automated CI/CD environment. By taking ownership of critical self-service and automation initiatives, you will help scale a lean infrastructure team to meet high demands and directly elevate the daily productivity and developer experience for several hundred engineers.

What You'll Do (Role Expectations)

• Serve as the Tech Lead to drive all Build pipeline optimizations
• Implement innovative automations to improve developer productivity
• Build a solid framework for CI/CD promotional pipelines

Who You Are (Success Profile)

• You act like an owner. Your passion for the mission fuels your bias for action. You operate with integrity because you genuinely care about the outcome. You adapt to what's needed, navigating seamlessly between high-level strategy and hands-on execution.
• You are a problem-solver. You seek out challenges because you are energized by finding solutions, knowing that solving the hard problems delivers the biggest impact.
• You are a high-trust collaborator. You are ambitious for the team, not just yourself. You embrace our challenge culture by giving and receiving ongoing feedback—knowing that candor delivered with clarity and respect is the truest form of teamwork and the fastest way to earn trust.
• You are a learner. You have a true growth mindset and never stop developing yourself, actively seeking feedback to become a better partner and a stronger teammate. You love what you do and you do it with purpose.
• You are customer-obsessed. You build deep empathy for the customer—both internal and external—and anchor your decisions in solving their real-world problems. You champion their needs from start to finish, knowing their success is our success.

What We're Looking for (Minimum Qualifications)

• 8+ years of experience designing and deploying large-scale infrastructure in public clouds (e.g., AWS, GCP) with expert-level proficiency in IaC tools (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Expert understanding of the end-to-end SDLC, Linux systems, kernel-level concepts, and complex software compilation and packaging processes
• Proven ability to programmatically build and scale CI/CD pipelines, utilizing strong programming expertise in Go and/or Python, along with tooling like Jenkins, GitLab, or Temporal
• Deep foundational knowledge required to onboard rapidly, understand complex ecosystems, and drive immediate, autonomous contributions

What Will Make You Stand Out (Preferred Qualifications)

• Familiarity with, or a strong desire to learn, the Bazel build system, as well as comfortability using AI-assisted coding tools (e.g., Windsurf, Claude) to accelerate delivery
• Strong hands-on experience on the FreeBSD platform
• Good experience in Hypervisor Platforms like Proxmox, ESXi
• Extensive hands-on experience with microservices architecture