Staff Software Development Engineer (Microservices)
Santa Clara · USD 133,000-190,000 · 2+ years experience · Hybrid · Posted Sep 24, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 2+ years experience
- Workplace
- Hybrid
- Location
- Santa Clara
- Salary
- USD 133,000-190,000 · Base salary
About the role
- We are looking for a Staff Software Development Engineer (Microservices) to join our team in Santa Clara, CA.
- You will build, operate, and continuously improve domain-aligned microservices for the Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) control plane.
- You will own services end to end from design through deployment to help the team evolve toward a cloud-native architecture at scale.
Responsibilities
- Build and operate low-latency, event-driven microservices end to end (API through storage) using resilience patterns while contributing to multi-region readiness.
- Implement paved-road patterns for service development, CI/CD, testing, and delivery by contributing to shared libraries, templates, and runbooks.
- Ship safely via GitOps workflows, progressive delivery, and automated rollback policies.
- Instrument services with metrics, logs, and distributed tracing, define and track SLIs/SLOs, and actively participate in incident response, on-call rotations, failure-tested runbooks, and postmortems.
- Collaborate with Product, SRE, Security, and Architecture on designs, tradeoffs, design reviews, and clear technical docs/ADRs.
- Elevate service security (OAuth2/OIDC, mTLS, service-to-service authZ, secrets management) and supply-chain integrity.
- Profile performance, guide capacity planning and autoscaling, and help optimize cloud cost for owned services.
Requirements
- Foundational understanding of AI/ML technologies and experience leveraging, securing, or positioning AI-driven solutions to optimize outcomes within your functional domain.
- 5+ years in software development, including 2+ years building and operating production microservices, with proficiency in Go and solid software engineering fundamentals.
- Kubernetes experience (EKS preferred), strong Docker fundamentals, experience delivering services in AWS, and familiarity with Git-based workflows, CI/CD, and common autoscaling and rollout patterns.
- Messaging and data store experience with Kafka or a similar broker, strong SQL proficiency (PostgreSQL/MySQL/Amazon RDS/Aurora), and experience with at least one NoSQL store (e.g., Cassandra/MongoDB/DynamoDB).
- Observability expertise across metrics (Prometheus), logs, and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), alongside practical incident management experience.
- Working knowledge of service security (OAuth2/OIDC), mTLS, and secrets management (e.g., KMS/Vault).
Preferred qualifications
- Proven ability to leverage AI technologies and workflows to drive measurable operational efficiency.
- Hands-on GitOps (Argo CD/Flux), feature flags, and progressive delivery at scale, alongside familiarity with service mesh (Istio/Linkerd) and policy-driven traffic management.
- Experience with chaos engineering, fault injection, or DR drills, combined with exposure to multi-region patterns, data consistency tradeoffs, and contributions to monolith-to-microservices migrations.
- Performance profiling and cloud cost optimization in AWS with basic FinOps awareness, plus OSS contributions, technical talks, or high-quality technical writing.
Benefits
- Various health plans
- Time off plans for vacation and sick time
- Parental leave options
- Retirement options
- Education reimbursement
- In-office perks
Workplace
- Hybrid role based in Santa Clara, CA
- In office minimum 3 days per week
Skills
- Go
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- AWS
- Kafka
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- Amazon RDS
- Aurora
- Cassandra
- MongoDB
- DynamoDB
Show all 15 skills
- Prometheus
- OpenTelemetry
- Argo CD
