Sr. Staff Software Development Engineer

Zscaler accelerates digital transformation to ensure our customers can be more agile, efficient, resilient, and secure. As an AI-forward enterprise, we are constantly pushing the envelope, leveraging the world’s largest security data lake to power our cloud-native Zero Trust Exchange platform. This innovation protects our customers from cyberattacks and data loss by securely connecting users, devices, and applications in any location.

Here, impact in your role matters more than title and trust is built on results. We say, impact over activity. We seek innovators who actively use AI to amplify their impact and who thrive in an environment where we leverage intelligent systems to stay ahead of evolving threats. We believe in transparency and value constructive, honest debate—we’re focused on getting to the best ideas, faster. We build high-performing teams that can make an impact quickly and with high quality. To do this, we are building a culture of execution centered on customer obsession, collaboration, ownership, and accountability.

We value high-impact, high-accountability with a sense of urgency where you’re enabled to do your best work and embrace your potential. If you’re driven by purpose, thrive on solving complex challenges, and want to be part of the team that’s helping to secure the AI age, we invite you to bring your talents to Zscaler and help shape the future of cybersecurity.

We are looking for a Senior Staff Software Development Engineer to join our team. This is a San Jose, CA role, reporting to the Director, Software Development Engineering in the Zero Trust Exchange department. We are hiring a Senior Staff Software Development Engineer to drive the evolution of our Client Connector Agent (CCA), a critical Windows client that provides secure connectivity, tunneling, and session management across enterprise and VDI environments. In this role, you will own core service-layer components including RPC, user session handling, and data pipelines to ensure CCA remains performant, scalable, resilient, and maintainable.

What you’ll do (Role Expectations)

• Design and implement features across the CCA service, user-mode UI, and supporting subsystems including the RPC server, session handler, data handler, and tunnel telemetry

• Diagnose and fix complex production issues such as service crashes, race conditions, lifetime bugs, and cross-process synchronization problems

• Improve reliability of long-running Windows service code including cleanup/shutdown paths and inter-process communication

• Work on VDI-specific flows including ZCC VDI SMB tunnel traffic accounting and session lifecycle management

• Review peers' code, raise the quality bar, and mentor other engineers on Windows systems programming

Who You Are (Success Profile)

• You thrive in ambiguity and see dynamic, complex environments as an opportunity to build meaningful solutions.

• You act like an owner, driving initiatives forward with passion, integrity, and a strong bias for action.

• You are a high-trust collaborator who embraces a challenge culture with clear, respectful, and constructive feedback.

• You are customer-obsessed, grounding engineering decisions in deep empathy to solve real-world problems.

• You champion simplicity by distilling complex technical concepts into clear, actionable plans.

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

• 8+ years of production software engineering