Sr. Staff Software Development Engineer
San Jose, United States · Full-time
- Posted 1mo ago
- From Zscaler’s careers page
- Location
- San Jose, United States
- Type
- Full-time
- Level
- Senior
- Experience
- 8+ years
- Department
- Software Development
Opens the listing on job-boards.greenhouse.io
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About the role
Role
We are looking for a Senior Staff Software Development Engineer to join our team. This is a San Jose, CA role, reporting to the Director, Software Development Engineering in the Zero Trust Exchange department. We are hiring a Senior Staff Software Development Engineer to drive the evolution of our Client Connector Agent (CCA), a critical Windows client that provides secure connectivity, tunneling, and session management across enterprise and VDI environments. In this role, you will own core service-layer components including RPC, user session handling, and data pipelines to ensure CCA remains performant, scalable, resilient, and maintainable.
What you’ll do (Role Expectations)
- Design and implement features across the CCA service, user-mode UI, and supporting subsystems including the RPC server, session handler, data handler, and tunnel telemetry
- Diagnose and fix complex production issues such as service crashes, race conditions, lifetime bugs, and cross-process synchronization problems
- Improve reliability of long-running Windows service code including cleanup/shutdown paths and inter-process communication
- Work on VDI-specific flows including ZCC VDI SMB tunnel traffic accounting and session lifecycle management
- Review peers' code, raise the quality bar, and mentor other engineers on Windows systems programming
Who You Are (Success Profile)
- You thrive in ambiguity and see dynamic, complex environments as an opportunity to build meaningful solutions.
- You act like an owner, driving initiatives forward with passion, integrity, and a strong bias for action.
- You are a high-trust collaborator who embraces a challenge culture with clear, respectful, and constructive feedback.
- You are customer-obsessed, grounding engineering decisions in deep empathy to solve real-world problems.
- You champion simplicity by distilling complex technical concepts into clear, actionable plans.
What We’re Looking for (Minimum Qualifications)
- Foundational understanding of AI/ML technologies and experience leveraging, securing, or positioning AI-driven solutions to optimize outcomes within your functional domain
- 8+ years of production software engineering experience with strong C++ (C++14/17) expertise
- Solid grasp of Windows internals including services, user sessions, security tokens, IPC, and process/thread lifetime
- Experience debugging multithreaded C++ including races, deadlocks, iterator invalidation, and use-after-free
- Proficiency with diagnostic tools like WinDbg, ETW, Process Monitor, and crash dump analysis
- Track record of shipping and maintaining an enterprise desktop or endpoint product
What Will Make You Stand Out (Preferred Qualifications)
- Deep background in networking, VPN, ZTNA, or secure tunneling architectures
- Experience with RPC (MS-RPC or custom), named pipes, or COM
- Familiarity with VDI platforms (Citrix, VMware Horizon, AVD), installer/updater flows, or kernel-mode components
Skills they ask for
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About Zscaler
Cloud security built around Zero TrustZscaler provides cloud security services built on a Zero Trust architecture for enterprise users, workloads, and applications.
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