Principal Software Development Engineer

Role 

We are looking for a Principal Software Development Engineer to join our team. This is a Hybrid role, reporting to the Senior Director, Software Engineering in the ZPA department. You will lead the architecture, deployment, and evolution of large-scale Generative AI platforms and intelligent agent systems in production. 

As a hands-on technical leader, you will design high-performance AI systems that are scalable, secure, observable, and production-ready, while building critical platform components and partnering across multidisciplinary teams to deliver reliable AI capabilities at scale.

What you’ll do (Role Expectations)

• Build and maintain MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers to standardize secure interactions between LLMs, agents, enterprise tools, APIs, databases, and local resources
• Design and deploy high-performance containerized Generative AI workloads in production using Docker, Kubernetes, model quantization, and KV-cache optimization to reduce latency and memory footprint
• Define engineering standards, architectural patterns, and best practices for building robust enterprise AI systems

Who You Are (Success Profile)

• You thrive in ambiguity. You're comfortable building the path as you walk it. You thrive in a dynamic environment, seeing ambiguity not as a hindrance, but as the raw material to build something meaningful.
• 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. True ownership involves leveraging dynamic range: the ability to navigate seamlessly between high-level strategy and hands-on execution.
• You are a problem-solver. You love running towards the challenges because you are laser-focused on finding the solution, 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 are obsessed with your own development, actively seeking feedback to become a better partner and a stronger teammate. You love what you do and you do it with purpose.

What We’re Looking for (Minimum Qualifications)

• Foundational understanding of AI/ML technologies and experience leveraging, securing, or positioning AI-driven solutions to optimize outcomes within your functional domain
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant expertise in distributed systems, platform engineering, or machine learning infrastructure
• Proven experience building, deploying, and operating production-grade AI/ML or LLM systems at scale
• Strong expertise in Python and systems languages such as Go, C++, Rust, or Java, alongside hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud-native deployment patterns

What Will Make You Stand Out (Preferred Qualifications)

• Hands-on experience implementing AI safety, evaluation benchmarks, guardrails, and observability frameworks for LLMs in enterprise environments
• Strong experience in RAG systems, vector databases, embedding pipelines, and retrieval tuning
• Experience with inference and serving frameworks such as vLLM, Tensor RT-LLM, Triton, Ray Serve, or equivalent

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