Senior Principal SWE, Rust Development

Zscaler•San Jose, CA

13d•Hybrid

About The Position

Zscaler is a pioneer and global leader in zero trust security. The world’s largest businesses, critical infrastructure organizations, and government agencies rely on Zscaler to secure users, branches, applications, data & devices, and to accelerate digital transformation initiatives. Distributed across more than 160 data centers globally, the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform combined with advanced AI combats billions of cyber threats and policy violations every day and unlocks productivity gains for modern enterprises by reducing costs and complexity. Here, impact in your role matters more than title and trust is built on results. 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 champion an “AI Forward, People First” philosophy to help us accelerate and innovate, empowering our people to embrace their potential. If you’re driven by purpose, thrive on solving complex challenges and want to make a positive difference on a global scale, we invite you to bring your talents to Zscaler to help shape the future of cybersecurity. We are looking for a Senior Principal SWE, Rust Development to join our Platform Convergence Team. This is a hybrid role based in San Jose, CA or Bellevue, WA reporting to the Sr. Director, Software Engineering. Join us to build a new platform from the ground up that can scale hundreds of millions of users with high reliability and low latency. You will design and implement distributed system and core infrastructure components while collaborating closely with various stakeholders.

Requirements

15+ years of software engineering 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
Proficiency in container-based environments, Git, CI/CD workflows, and performance instrumentation

Nice To Haves

Experience with systems languages like C/C++ or Go, particularly in performance-critical environments
Familiarity with Linux networking stacks, kernel-space technologies such as eBPF or DPDK, and Kubernetes networking or service meshes
Hands-on experience with gRPC, Protobufs, and L2–L4 networking protocols including TCP/IP, QUIC, or routing encapsulations

Responsibilities

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