Principal Rust Developer

About Zscaler

Serving thousands of enterprise customers around the world including 45% of Fortune 500 companies, Zscaler (NASDAQ: ZS) was founded in 2007 with a mission to make the cloud a safe place to do business and a more enjoyable experience for enterprise users. As the operator of the world’s largest security cloud, Zscaler accelerates digital transformation so enterprises can be more agile, efficient, resilient, and secure. The pioneering, AI-powered Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange™ platform, which is found in our SASE and SSE offerings, protects thousands of enterprise customers from cyberattacks and data loss by securely connecting users, devices, and applications in any location.

Named a Best Workplace in Technology by Fortune and others, Zscaler fosters an inclusive and supportive culture that is home to some of the brightest minds in the industry. If you thrive in an environment that is fast-paced and collaborative, and you are passionate about building and innovating for the greater good, come make your next move with Zscaler. 

Our Engineering team built the world's largest security cloud platform from the ground up, and we keep building. With more than 100 patents and big plans for enhancing services and increasing our global footprint, the team has made us and our multitenant architecture today's cloud security leader, with more than 15 million users in 185 countries. Bring your vision and passion to our team of cloud architects, software engineers, security experts, and more who are enabling organizations worldwide to harness speed and agility with a cloud-first strategy.

We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join our platform convergence team. This is a hybrid role, reporting in the San Jose office 3 days a week.  Reporting to the Sr. Director of Software Engineering, you'll be responsible for: 

• Designing and building a low-latency, high-throughput data forwarding plane using Rust, leveraging its async/await model for efficient I/O and service-oriented infrastructure
• Developing distributed, scalable systems with a focus on concurrency, fault tolerance, and messaging
• Implementing and maintaining gRPC-based APIs and services to integrate forwarding plane capabilities with control and orchestration layers
• Optimizing system performance through profiling tools across kernel-space and user-space
• Engaging in code reviews, system design discussions, technical documentation, and mentoring junior engineers

What We're Looking for (Minimum Qualifications) 

• 10+ years of experience with extensive experience coding with Rust, particularly in systems programming and async frameworks like Tokio or async-std
• Proven expertise in building resilient, observable, and horizontally scalable distributed systems
• Strong understanding of Linux fundamentals, including networking, namespaces, sockets, and kernel-user space interaction
• Proficient in container-based environments, Git, CI/CD workflows, and performance instrumentation

What Will Make You Stand Out (Preferred Qualifications)

• Experience with systems languages like C/C++ or Go, particularly in performance-critical environments
• Familiarity with Linux networking stacks, kernel-space technologies (eBPF, XDP, DPDK), bare-metal deployments, Kubernetes networking, service meshes, or observability tools
• Hands-on experience with gRPC, Protobufs, service-oriented architectures, and L2–L4 networking protocols (TCP/IP, UDP, QUIC, VLAN, routing, encapsulations, etc.)

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#LI-Hybrid

At Zscaler, we are committed to building a team that reflects the communities we serve and the customers we work with. We foster an inclusive environment that values all backgrounds and perspectives, emphasizing collaboration and belonging. Join us in our mission to make doing business seamless and secure.

Our Benefits program is one of the most important ways we support our employees. Zscaler proudly offers comprehensive and inclusive benefits to meet the diverse needs of our employees and their families throughout their life stages, including:

By applying for this role, you adhere to applicable laws, regulations, and Zscaler policies, including those related to security and privacy standards and guidelines.

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