Sr. Software Development Engineer (Backend - Python/Go)

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 seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer – Backend to join our engineering team. In this role, you will design, build, deploy, and support scalable backend services and cloud-native systems. This position requires hands-on backend development experience coupled with a strong sense of ownership across the entire service lifecycle—from initial implementation and deployment to scaling, troubleshooting, and production support. You will tackle a broad range of backend and platform challenges, working closely with distributed services, containers, Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructure What You'll Do (Key Responsibilities) - Build & Maintain Backend Services: Design, develop, test, and maintain backend services and APIs with a steadfast focus on scalability, reliability, performance, and maintainability - Full Lifecycle Ownership: Deeply contribute across the full lifecycle of backend services, managing development, deployment, scaling, monitoring, and ongoing production support - Deploy & Operate Cloud-Native Workloads: Build and manage services within containerized environments, directly contributing to deployment and troubleshooting on Kubernetes - Production Reliability & Troubleshooting: Actively monitor service health, investigate incidents, debug failures, and perform root-cause analysis across distributed systems to maintain seamless production operations - Cloud & Infrastructure Engineering: Partner with cloud infrastructure and compute environments to support workload deployment, service configuration, and operational troubleshooting Who You Are (Success Profile) - You Think at Scale: You connect your day-to-day work to the larger company mission and think globally. You build solutions, processes, and architectures that are not just effective today, but are built to last and support a high-growth organization - You are Driven by Innovation: You possess a deep curiosity for how things work and are energized by solving complex technical hurdles. You believe in the power of technology to accelerate transformation and consistently hunt for more secure, scalable methods - You are a Problem-Solver: You actively seek out engineering challenges because you are energized by finding solutions, knowing that solving the hardest problems delivers the biggest business and customer impact - You are Data-Driven: You lean on data and analytics to uncover engineering truths, measure what matters, and guide informed architectural decisions replacing "I think" with "I know." - You are a Learner: You have a true growth mindset and never stop developing your technical or leadership skills. You actively seek and implement feedback to become an exceptional collaborator and teammate What We're Looking For (Minimum Qualifications) - AI & Innovation: Demonstrated curiosity and active exploration of AI tools, with a proven history of integrating new technologies to enhance daily workflows and augment problem-solving capabilities - Experience: 2 to 4 years of professional software development experience in backend, distributed systems, or platform-oriented engineering roles. - Technical Stack: Proven experience building production-grade backend services and APIs using Python or Go - Cloud-Native Environments: Hands-on experience deploying, scaling, and troubleshooting containers and Kubernetes; familiarity with cloud platforms (GCP is a plus) - Resilience & Debugging: Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills, with a demonstrated ability to perform root-cause analysi