About Zscaler
Serving thousands of enterprise customers around the world including 45% of Fortune 500 companies, Zscaler (NASDAQ: ZS) was founded in 2007 with a mission to make the cloud a safe place to do business and a more enjoyable experience for enterprise users. As the operator of the world’s largest security cloud, Zscaler accelerates digital transformation so enterprises can be more agile, efficient, resilient, and secure. The pioneering, AI-powered Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange™ platform, which is found in our SASE and SSE offerings, protects thousands of enterprise customers from cyberattacks and data loss by securely connecting users, devices, and applications in any location.
Named a Best Workplace in Technology by Fortune and others, Zscaler fosters an inclusive and supportive culture that is home to some of the brightest minds in the industry. If you thrive in an environment that is fast-paced and collaborative, and you are passionate about building and innovating for the greater good, come make your next move with Zscaler.
Our Engineering team built the world’s largest cloud security platform from the ground up, and we keep building. With more than 100 patents and big plans for enhancing services and increasing our global footprint, the team has made us and our multitenant architecture today's cloud security leader, with more than 15 million users in 185 countries. Bring your vision and passion to our team of cloud architects, software engineers, security experts, and more who are enabling organizations worldwide to harness speed and agility with a cloud-first strategy.
We are looking for a Principal Software Development Engineer to lead our Kubernetes-based platform across multiple regions and sovereign/regulated environments - owning reliability, performance, security, and efficiency. You’ll set standards, design architecture, and drive initiatives that help engineering teams ship quickly with confidence.
This role will be reporting to the Senior Manager, Software Development Engineering and you'll be responsible for:
- Owning architecture and lifecycle of multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters across public and sovereign environments; deliver 99.999% uptime with multi-region HA, failover, DR, scaling, and security hardening
- Building and automating platform capabilities (e.g., Go operators, GitOps) and enforce standards for networking, RBAC, policies, quotas, and multi-tenancy
- Leading observability and performance at scale (SLOs/error budgets, Prometheus/Grafana/OpenTelemetry, tracing/profiling, capacity planning) and drive cost efficiency
- Driving supply chain and runtime security (Sigstore image signing, SBOMs, vulnerability scanning, OPA/Gatekeeper/Kyverno, secrets management) and operate safe CI/CD rollouts (canary/blue‑green) with automated change management
- Troubleshooting complex production issues across control/data planes, CNI/CSI, and service meshes and also lead incident response, postmortems, and systemic fixes
What We're Looking for (Minimum Qualifications)
- 12+ years in platform/infra engineering with 5+ years operating Kubernetes in production at multi-cluster, multi-region scale
- Deep hands-on knowledge of Kubernetes internals and operations (control plane components, etcd health, scheduling, HPA/VPA, Cluster Autoscaler, upgrade strategies, workload tuning)
- Strong proficiency in Go (preferred) and Python for building operators, controllers, CLI tools, and automation
- Expertise in cloud networking and service connectivity (CNI Calico/Cilium, Ingress/Gateway API, Istio/Linkerd, TLS/mTLS, L4/L7 traffic management) and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki/Tempo, OpenTelemetry)
- Proven leadership of complex platform initiatives with rigorous IaC/GitOps (Terraform, Helm/Kustomize, Argo CD/Flux), security-first practices (RBAC, secrets, policy-as-code), and strong architecture/design communication; Bachelor’s in CS/Engineering or related field
What Will Make You Stand Out (Preferred Qualifications)
- Multi-cloud operations (AWS/GCP/Azure) including EKS/GKE/AKS and hybrid/on‑prem; experience in sovereign/regulated environments and controls mapping (e.g., ISO27001, SOC2, FedRAMP-equivalent)
- Performance, storage, and networking at scale (kernel/container runtime tuning, CSI/stateful workloads, backup/restore/DR, eBPF/Cilium, zero trust, WAF/DDoS) with cost/capacity management aligned to SLOs
- Contributions to CNCF/open source or published talks/papers; advanced degree is a plus
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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!
Learn more about Zscaler’s Future of Work strategy, hybrid working model, and benefits here.
By applying for this role, you adhere to applicable laws, regulations, and Zscaler policies, including those related to security and privacy standards and guidelines.
Zscaler is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all individuals. We strive to create a workplace where employees are treated with respect and have the chance to succeed. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy or related medical conditions), age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws. See more information by clicking on the Know Your Rights: Workplace Discrimination is Illegal link.
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.
