Senior Rust Developer

Position: Senior Staff Rust Developer
Zscaler (NASDAQ: ZS) accelerates digital transformation so customers can be more agile, efficient, resilient, and secure. The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform protects thousands of customers from cyberattacks and data loss by securely connecting users, devices, and applications in any location. Distributed across 200+ public data centers globally and thousands of private sites at the edge, the SASE-based Zero Trust Exchange is the world’s largest in-line cloud security platform.

We believe the future of work is Human + AI and are building an AI-native enterprise where human potential is amplified by machine intelligence to solve the world’s hardest security challenges. Driven by deep customer obsession, we are committed to the mission, outcome, and to each other. We bring these commitments to life through three core behaviors: ownership and collaboration, trust through outcomes and impact, and a challenge culture with ongoing feedback.

Ready to make an impact at the company pioneering security transformation in the AI era? Join us eWe are looking for a Senior Staff Rust Developer to join our Platform Convergence Team. This is a hybrid role based in San Jose, CA reporting to the Sr. Director, Software Engineering. Join us to build a new platform from the ground up that can scale hundreds of millions of users with high reliability and low latency.

You will design and implement distributed system and core infrastructure components while collaborating closely with various stakeholders.

What you’ll do (Role Expectations)
Design and build a low-latency, high-throughput data forwarding plane using Rust, leveraging its async/await model for efficient I/O and service-oriented infrastructure

Develop distributed, scalable systems with a focus on concurrency, fault tolerance, and messaging

Implement and maintain gRPC-based APIs and services to integrate forwarding plane capabilities with control and orchestration layers

Optimize system performance through profiling tools across kernel-space and user-space

Engage in code reviews, system design discussions, technical documentation, and mentoring junior engineers

Who You Are (Success Profile)
You act like an owner, fueling your bias for action with a passion for the mission and navigating seamlessly between high-level strategy and hands-on execution.

You are a problem-solver who seeks out challenges and is energized by finding solutions to hard problems that deliver the biggest impact.

You are customer-obsessed, building deep empathy for internal and external customers and anchoring every decision in solving their real-world problems.

You are driven by innovation and technical curiosity, constantly looking for better, more secure, and scalable ways to accelerate transformation.

You think at scale, connecting your work to the larger company mission and building solutions that support a high-growth, global organization.

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

Extensive experience coding with Rust, particularly in systems programming and async frameworks like Tokio or async-std Proven expertise in building resilient, observable, and horizontally scalable distributed systems

Strong understanding of Linux fundamentals, including networking, name spaces, sockets, and kernel-user space interaction

Proficiency in container-based environments, Git, CI/CD workflows, and performance instrumentation

What Will Make You Stand Out (Preferred Qualifications)
Proven ability to leverage AI technologies and workflows to drive measurable operational efficiency

Experience with systems languages like C/C++…