Senior Software Development Engineer

Role

As a hands-on Senior AI Engineer within Zscaler's IT AI/ML Engineering team in India, you will design, build, test, and operate production-grade AI applications used by employees and customers globally. Collaborating daily with a US-based technical lead and distributed teammates, you will own well-scoped projects end-to-end, specializing either in agents and retrieval systems or AI business solutions and platform support.

What You'll Do (Role Expectations)

• Design and build production-grade AI services, APIs, and retrieval pipelines in Python with clean, tested, and well-documented code.
• Lead scoped AI projects from design to launch, breaking down ambiguous business requirements into clear technical tasks.
• Integrate test sets, regression checks, tracing, and cost/latency tracking into every feature to ensure system reliability.
• Partner closely with global, cross-functional teams, share status transparently, review code, and mentor junior engineers.
• Provide L2 support for AI applications, administer enterprise AI platforms, write runbooks, and build automation to reduce repeat issues.

Who You Are (Success Profile)

• You take pride in owning a technical project from initial design and prototyping all the way to production monitoring and support.
• You are dedicated to clean code, robust testing, data-handling security practices, and raising the collective standards of your team.
• You enjoy running structured experiments with models, prompts, and retrieval strategies to turn results into clear, actionable recommendations.
• You thrive in global environments, communicating technical concepts clearly in English and working seamlessly across time zones.
• You excel at translating complex business problems into reliable, automated AI workflows and user-friendly experiences.

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
• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years of hands-on experience building applications with LLMs or ML services.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering (or equivalent experience) with strong Python skills and solid API/service design.
• Hands-on experience with prompt design, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and function calling or agent frameworks.
• Experience evaluating AI systems using test sets, regression checks, and tracing or monitoring tools.
• Working knowledge of cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure), Docker, CI/CD, and experience debugging and supporting production services.

What Will Make You Stand Out (Preferred Qualifications)

• Proven ability to leverage AI technologies and workflows to drive operational efficiency, backed by exposure to how AI agents or models are built
• Experience with vector/graph databases, embeddings, rerankers, model serving, fine-tuning, or open-weight models.
• Familiarity with Model Context Protocol (MCP), tool-integration standards, and agent memory/context management.
• Experience administering enterprise AI platforms (e.g., Claude, OpenAI, Bedrock) or building custom Slack bots and web widgets.
• Proven experience running technical workshops, writing runbooks, or contributing to the community via open-source, publications, or talks.

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