Sr. Staff Production Engineer

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 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.

About the role

This is a hybrid role (3 days a week in San Jose, CA or Bellevue, WA), reporting to the VP, Site Reliability Engineering in the Cloud Infrastructure & Operations department. Join Zscaler to be a force multiplier for the reliability of a global platform protecting over 15 million users. In this role, you will provide the technical vision and hands-on execution to drive an "automation-first" culture across the company. By maturing our observability and architectural standards, you will directly reduce our Mean Time to Mitigate (MTTM) and shape the scalability of our globally distributed, multi-cloud infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement highly available, scalable infrastructure across AWS, Azure, GCP, and bare-metal environments
• Drive an "automation-first" culture by writing code (Python/Go) to eliminate manual toil and build self-healing systems
• Implement and maintain sophisticated observability (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry), define SLIs/SLOs, and establish error budgets
• Act as a lead Incident Commander (TDO on-call), develop response playbooks, and conduct deep-dive post-incident analyses
• Partner with Engineering and partner teams to conduct operability reviews

Requirements

• Foundational understanding of AI/ML technologies and experience leveraging, securing, or positioning AI-driven solutions to optimize outcomes within your functional domain
• 8+ years of experience managing reliability, scalability, and availability for large-scale production services with deep expertise in programming (e.g., Python, Go, or C/C++)
• Strong background in networking protocols, Linux/FreeBSD systems, and distributed architecture
• Experience in high-stakes incident management and participation in a 24/7 on-call rotation
• Proficiency in leveraging ITIL frameworks and incident data to drive service maturity through systematic problem management and technical operability reviews

Qualifications

What You Are:

• You thrive in ambiguity, comfortable building the path as you walk it in a dynamic environment
• You act like an owner, with a passion for the mission fueling your bias for action and integrity
• You are a problem-solver, running toward challenges with a focus on delivering impactful solutions
• You are a high-trust collaborator, ambitious for the team and embracing constructive feedback
• You are a learner, with a growth mindset and a commitment to continuous development

Skills

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience implementing AI-driven AIOps tools, machine learning models for anomaly detection, or predictive capacity planning to optimize infrastructure reliability and automate incident response
• Extensive experience with public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), Infrastructure-as-Code (Ansible, Terraform), and chaos engineering or disaster recovery planning at scale
• Expertise in global routing (BGP), traffic tunneling (GRE, IPSec), L7 proxy architectures (HAProxy), DNS at scale, and OS networking stack internals

Pay

Zscaler’s salary ranges are benchmarked and determined by role and level. The range displayed reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for this position across all US locations. The base salary range for this full-time position is $143,500—$205,000 USD (excludes commission/bonus/equity, if applicable, plus benefits).

Benefits

Our Benefits program supports 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