Principal DevOps Engineer

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 DevOps Engineer to join our team. This is a hybrid role based in San Jose, CA 3 days a week, reporting to the Sr. Manager, Software Engineering in the Zero Trust Exchange department. You'll own the day-to-day operational reliability of our Zero Trust Branch platform — building automated onboarding pipelines, maintaining Kubernetes-based infrastructure in AWS (including federal/IL5 environments), and leading on-call incident response through ServiceNow. As we rapidly scale our customer base, you'll be the engineer who ensures our GitOps workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud environments can keep up with that growth. What you’ll do (Role Expectations) - Design and automate customer onboarding workflows that reduce provisioning time from days to hours, enabling the team to scale across hundreds of commercial and federal (IL5) tenants - Own and mature the on-call rotation and incident management process in ServiceNow — defining runbooks, escalation paths, and SLOs that drive mean-time-to-resolution down and keep platform availability above target - Build and maintain GitOps-driven CI/CD pipelines using GitLab and ArgoCD to enable safe, repeatable deployments to production Kubernetes clusters, minimizing human error and accelerating release velocity - Proactively identify and eliminate infrastructure reliability risks through monitoring, capacity planning, and automated remediation — catching problems before customers feel them - Establish operational standards and documentation that enable the broader engineering team to self-serve deployments and troubleshooting, reducing bottlenecks on the DevOps team as the organization scales 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. 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. 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 - U.S. Citizenship — required for access to federal cloud environments (IL5) - Deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes and AWS — you'll be managing production clusters daily, not just dabbling - Experience with on-call rotations and incident management workflows — you've carried a pager, written runbooks, and driven postmortems What Will Make You Stand Out (Preferred Qualifications) - Ex