Sr. Staff Software Development Engineer

Overview

Sr. Staff/Staff Applied AI Engineer role at Zscaler involving hands-on development of secure, production-grade AI solutions and advising business teams on AI transformation.

What you'll do

• Partner with business leaders and product owners from discovery through delivery to map workflows and identify AI opportunities.
• Design and ship secure AI solutions including retrieval-augmented generation, structured querying, unstructured mining, and agentic workflows.
• Integrate AI solutions with core systems of record.
• Establish monitoring and evaluation frameworks and implement least-privilege access for deployments.
• Set engineering standards by creating reusable building blocks, reference architectures, skills, and playbooks, and mentor team members.

What you'll need

• Minimum 6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• At least 3 years working directly on AI and/or ML projects.
• Hands-on experience with modern AI architecture components such as retrieval methods, agentic orchestration, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration.
• Proven collaboration with business stakeholders for discovery, planning, and communicating trade-offs and risks.
• Demonstrated experience securing AI systems and data with least-privilege access and defenses against prompt injection, data leakage, and non-compliant outputs.
• Strong Python foundation and experience deploying AI at scale on AWS, GCP, or Azure, integrating with APIs and relational/vector databases.

Details

• Work mode: On-site (San Jose, California) or Remote (US).
• Reporting line: Manager, Applied AI Engineering in the IT/Data Strategy department.