Site Reliability Engineer; Production Engineer

Role

We are looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer (Production Engineer) to join our team. This is a hybrid role (onsite three days a week in San Jose, CA or another Zscaler office; remote can be considered for exceptional candidates) reporting to the Senior Manager, Site Reliability Engineering in the Zero Trust Exchange department. As a key member of the Zero Trust Exchange team, you will be responsible for all aspects of the Zscaler production data center services, including servers, operating systems, storage, and supporting systems.

You will be an instrumental part of the Site Reliability Engineering team, ensuring the availability, latency, performance, efficiency, and scalability of a cloud that processes tens of billions of transactions daily.

• Own the reliability of a large‑scale cloud service (Linux/BSD, bare metal, Kubernetes, custom load balancing, SD‑WAN) by partnering with Engineering and Network teams to define requirements early, conduct operability reviews, and contribute code/design docs for platform resilience
• Develop and operate end‑to‑end observability (metrics/logs/traces, dashboards, alerting) and incident tooling to manage SLOs/error budgets, reduce noise, and improve system detection and diagnosis
• Participate in an on‑call rotation to lead full‑cycle incident response; perform deep cross‑stack troubleshooting (OS, networking, distributed systems, packet captures, core dumps) to drive permanent software fixes and codify learnings into runbooks and tests
• Build and maintain everything‑as‑code for fleet and service lifecycle, driving provisioning, configuration, release automation, canary deployments, and complex rollout/rollback workflows
• Continuously improve platform hygiene through consistent OS/app upgrades, dependency/vulnerability patching, capacity and performance tuning, and strict CI/CD validation prior to production rollouts

• 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.

• Foundational understanding of AI/ML technologies and experience leveraging, securing, or positioning AI‑driven solutions to optimize outcomes within your functional domain
• US Citizenship is required (due to the nature of assigned customers)
• 5+ years industry experience in software engineering, infrastructure software, and/or platform engineering
• Proficiency in at least one programming language (such as Python, Bash, or Go) with demonstrated ability to write production‑quality code (testing, code reviews, CI, maintainable design, scripting for diagnostics)
• Strong Linux/Unix systems fundamentals (process/memory, file systems, networking stack basics, debugging/perf troubleshooting) and solid understanding of networking protocols and components (e.g., HTTP, DNS, TCP/IP, ICMP, OSI model, subnetting, and load balancing/traffic concepts)
• Proven experience operating production services (including incident response, troubleshooting, reducing toil) and managing BSD in production to…