Principal Software Development Engineer (Microservices)
Principal engineer leading the modernization of Zscaler's ZIA control plane into cloud-native, API-first microservices on AWS (Go, Kubernetes, Kafka), owning end-to-end design, multi-region reliability (SLOs, observability), and microservices security. Hybrid role based in the Santa Clara, CA office, minimum 3 days per week.
- Compensation
- $185.5K–$265K / yr
- Location
- Santa Clara, California, USA
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Principal
- Employment
- Contract
- Experience
- 4+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Foundational understanding of AI/ML technologies and experience leveraging, securing, or positioning AI-driven solutions
- 12+ years in software development with 4+ years building and operating production microservices at significant scale, including proficiency in Go
- Deep experience with distributed systems and messaging (Kafka preferred; SQS/RabbitMQ acceptable), including CQRS and Event Sourcing where fit-for-purpose
- Kubernetes in AWS at scale (EKS preferred), strong Docker fundamentals, Infrastructure-as-Code, and GitOps workflows
- Strong SQL (PostgreSQL/MySQL/Amazon RDS/Aurora) and NoSQL (Cassandra/MongoDB/DynamoDB) design and scaling with multi-region data trade-offs
- Reliability and security experience: SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, SLO-based alerting, incident management, service mesh (Istio/Linkerd), mTLS, OAuth2/OIDC, secrets management (
- Performance engineering and cost optimization in AWS
Nice to have
- Proven ability to leverage AI technologies and workflows to drive measurable operational efficiency
- Chaos engineering, advanced load/performance testing, fault injection, and disaster recovery drills with multi-region design expertise (active-active, partitioning, replication, eventual consistency)
- Migration leadership (strangler patterns, domain decomposition)
- Event contract governance (Avro/Protobuf with schema registry), DLQ processing strategies, and data replay tooling
- OSS contributions, technical talks, patents, or published design writing
Full description
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 Principal Software Development Engineer (Microservices) to join our team. This is a hybrid role (in Santa Clara, CA office, minimum 3 days per week), reporting to the Senior Director, Software Development Engineering in the Engineering ZIA Core department. You will work on the control plane for the Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) product, helping evolve the platform to meet massive scale with cloud-native, microservices-based architecture.
What you’ll do (Role Expectations)
- Lead the technical roadmap to modernize the ZIA control plane using API-first, domain-aligned microservices with clear service ownership and multi-region architectures (active-active, failover, disaster recovery)
- Design, develop, and operate low-latency, event-driven services end to end (API through storage) utilizing resilience patterns, progressive delivery (blue/green, canary, feature flags), GitOps workflows (Argo CD/Flux), and safe rollout/rollback strategies
- Drive engineering excellence through standards, code reviews, testing, paved-road patterns, API and event contract governance (versioning, consumer-driven contracts, schema registry, DLQs), and cross-functional partnerships across Product, SRE, Security, Data, and Architecture while representing designs in customer/partner forums
- Own service reliability and operability end to end, including SLI/SLOs (p95/p99 latency, availability), SLO-based alerting, error budgets, incident response, postmortems, and advanced observability with distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger/Tempo) and structured logging
- Embed microservices security (OAuth2/OIDC, mTLS, service-to-service authZ, KMS/Vault), supply-chain integrity (SBOM, SLSA), performance optimization, capacity planning, and cloud spend/autoscaling across AWS primitives