Principal Rust Developer

About the role

Zscaler is an AI-forward enterprise that builds a new platform from the ground up to scale hundreds of millions of users with high reliability and low latency. This role is a hybrid position based in San Jose, CA or Bellevue, WA, reporting to the Sr. Director, Software Engineering.

Responsibilities

• Design and build a low-latency, high-throughput data forwarding plane using Rust, leveraging its async/await model for efficient I/O and service-oriented infrastructure
• Develop distributed, scalable systems with a focus on concurrency, fault tolerance, and messaging
• Implement and maintain gRPC-based APIs and services to integrate forwarding plane capabilities with control and orchestration layers
• Optimize system performance through profiling tools across kernel-space and user-space
• Engage in code reviews, system design discussions, technical documentation, and mentoring junior engineers

Requirements

• 12+ years in software development, with extensive experience coding with Rust, particularly in systems programming and async frameworks like Tokio or async-std
• Proven expertise in building resilient, observable, and horizontally scalable distributed systems
• Strong understanding of Linux fundamentals, including networking, namespaces, sockets, and kernel-user space interaction
• Proficiency in container-based environments, Git, CI/CD workflows, and performance instrumentation

Qualifications

• You act like an owner, fueling your bias for action with a passion for the mission and navigating seamlessly between high-level strategy and hands-on execution.
• You are a problem-solver who seeks out challenges and are energized by finding solutions to hard problems that deliver the biggest impact.
• You are customer-obsessed, building deep empathy for internal and external customers and anchoring every decision in solving their real-world problems.
• You are driven by innovation and technical curiosity, constantly looking for better, more secure, and scalable ways to accelerate transformation.
• You think at scale, connecting your work to the larger company mission and building solutions that support a high-growth, global organization.

Skills

• Experience with systems languages like C/C++ or Go, particularly in performance-critical environments
• Familiarity with Linux networking stacks, kernel-space technologies such as eBPF or DPDK, and Kubernetes networking or service meshes
• Hands-on experience with gRPC, Protobufs, and L2–L4 networking protocols including TCP/IP, QUIC, or routing encapsulations

Benefits

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

Pay

Base Pay Range: $182,000 - $260,000 USD

Schedule

This role is a hybrid position.