Staff Software Development Engineer (Microservices)

Staff Software Development Engineer (Microservices)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.Role ExpectationsBuild 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 reductionImplement 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 policiesInstrument 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 postmortemsCollaborate 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 integrityProfile performance, guide capacity planning and autoscaling, and help optimize cloud cost for owned servicesSuccess ProfileYou 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.Minimum QualificationsFoundational understanding of AI/ML technologies and experience leveraging, securing, or positioning AI-driven solutions to optimize outcomes within your functional domain5+ 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 patternsMessaging 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 experienceWorking knowledge of service security (OAuth2/OIDC), mTLS, and secrets management (e.g., KMS/Vault)Preferred QualificationsProven ability to leverage AI technologies and workflows to drive measurable operational efficiencyHands-on GitOps (Argo CD/Flux), feature flags, and progressive delivery at scale, alongside familiarity with service mesh (Istio/Linkerd) and policy-driven traffic managementExperience with chaos engineering, fault injection, or DR drills, combined with exposure to multi-region patterns, data consistency tradeoffs, and contributions to monolith-to-microservices migrationsPerformance profiling and cloud cost optimization in AWS with basic FinOps awareness, plus OSS contributions, technical talks, or high-quality technical writing