Principal Software Engineer (Service Platform & Orchestration)

About Zscaler 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. Role We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer (Service Platform & Orchestration) to join our team. This is a Hybrid (3 days in office) role, reporting to the VP, Engineering in the Zero Trust Exchange department. In this high-ownership position, you will engineer the management plane and reliability systems that govern ZIA’s fleet lifecycle at massive scale. This is a hands-on building role where you will lead the transformation of our infrastructure from legacy automation into a stateful, durable management plane (built on Temporal) to achieve deterministic "one-touch" provisioning and lifecycle operations. You will treat "infrastructure as a distributed system," developing self-healing capabilities and AI-driven SRE practices for a global fleet of 100k+ instances. What you’ll do (Role Expectations) - Lead the hands-on development and migration to a workflow-as-code platform (Temporal), building replay-safe, idempotent workflows that ensure deterministic operations across a global scale - Move the organization beyond "scripted automation" toward a robust management plane that treats the entire global fleet as a single, eventually-consistent distributed system - Design and implement services that leverage LLMs and ML for intelligent signal correlation, automated triage, and "self-correcting" fleet operations - Develop framework-level services and internal APIs that ensure all new products are delivered "orchestration-ready" with reliability hooks built directly into the code - Build deep telemetry (metrics, traces, and events) into the management plane so that every fleet-wide action is fully explainable, auditable, and replayable Who You Are (Success Profile) - 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. You adapt to what’s needed, navigating seamlessly between high-level strategy and hands-on execution. - You operate with urgency. You understand that in a high-growth environment, speed and quality are not mutually exclusive. You have a relentless focus on execution and a bias for action, delivering high-impact results quickly to win for the customer and the team. - You think at scale. You connect your day-to-day work to the larger company mission and think globally. You build solutions, processes, and teams that are not just effective today but are built to last and support a high-growth, global organization. - You are resilient and adaptable. You view change as an opportunity and setbacks as temporary. You maintain composure and focus in high-pressure situations, guiding yourself and your team through complexity with a steady, positive hand. 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 - BS/MS in Computer Science or a related technical field with 10+ years of experience in hyperscale systems, with a deep understanding of the unique failure modes and technical hurdles that only emerge at massive scale - Mastery of backend systems languages (Go, Java, Python, or others) with a proven ability to set the bar for code quality, maintainability, and distributed system correctness