Staff Software Development Engineer (Microservices)

Role

We are looking for a Staff Software Development Engineer (Microservices) to join our team. This is a hybrid role based in Santa Clara, CA (in office minimum 3 days per week), reporting to the Senior Director, Software Development Engineering in the Engineering ZIA Core department. You will build, operate, and continuously improve domain-aligned microservices for the Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) control plane while owning services end to end from design through deployment to help the team evolve toward a cloud-native architecture at scale.

What you’ll do (Role Expectations)

• Build and operate low-latency, event-driven microservices end to end (API through storage) using resilience patterns (circuit breakers, retries with jitter, back-pressure, idempotency, sagas/outbox) while contributing to multi-region readiness through sound data partitioning, stateless design, and blast-radius reduction
• Implement paved-road patterns for service development, CI/CD, testing, and delivery by contributing to shared libraries, templates, and runbooks while shipping safely via GitOps workflows (e.g., Argo CD/Flux), progressive delivery (canary/blue-green, feature flags), and automated rollback policies
• Instrument services with metrics, logs, and distributed tracing, define and track SLIs/SLOs, and actively participate in incident response, on-call rotations, failure-tested runbooks, and postmortems
• Collaborate with Product, SRE, Security, and Architecture on designs, tradeoffs, design reviews, and clear technical docs/ADRs while elevating service security (OAuth2/OIDC, mTLS, service-to-service authZ, secrets management) and supply-chain integrity
• Profile performance, guide capacity planning and autoscaling, and help optimize cloud cost for owned services

Who You Are (Success Profile)

• You act like an owner. You operate with a strong bias for action and accountability, navigating seamlessly between hands-on coding, technical design, and production operations.
• You are a pragmatic builder. You are passionate about creating, iterating, and shipping resilient software, balancing technical excellence with speed to deliver measurable outcomes.
• You champion simplicity. You excel at distilling complex distributed systems challenges into simple, robust, and maintainable cloud-native solutions.
• You are a high-trust collaborator. You work cross-functionally with Product, SRE, and Security teams, giving and receiving feedback to build trust and elevate team engineering standards.
• You think at scale. You design systems built to last, connecting day-to-day microservices engineering to high-availability, multi-region architecture and company-wide reliability goals.

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 in software development, including 2+ years building and operating production microservices, with proficiency in Go and solid software engineering fundamentals (testing, design, code quality)
• Kubernetes experience (EKS preferred), strong Docker fundamentals, experience delivering services in AWS, and familiarity with Git-based workflows, CI/CD, and common autoscaling and rollout patterns
• Messaging and data store experience with Kafka or a similar broker, strong SQL proficiency (PostgreSQL/MySQL/Amazon RDS/Aurora), and experience with at least one NoSQL store (e.g., Cassandra/MongoDB/DynamoDB)
• Observability expertise across metrics (Prometheus), logs, and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), alongside practical incident management experience
• Working knowledge of service security (OAuth2/OIDC), mTLS, and secrets management (e.g., KMS/Vault)

What Will Make You Stand Out (Preferred Qualifications)

• Proven ability to leverage AI technologies and workflows to drive measurable operational efficiency
• Hands-on GitOps (Argo CD/Flux), feature flags, and progressive delivery at scale, alongside familiarity with service mesh (Istio/Linkerd) and policy-driven traffic management
• Experience with chaos engineering, fault injection, or DR drills, combined with exposure to multi-region patterns, data consistency tradeoffs, and contributions to monolith-to-microservices migrations
• Performance profiling and cloud cost optimization in AWS with basic FinOps awareness, plus OSS contributions, technical talks, or high-quality technical writing

#LI-KM #LI-Hybrid