Principal Software Development Engineer (Microservices)

Description

The company makes a cloud security platform, the company Zero Trust Exchange, which connects users, devices and applications from any location while protecting them from cyberattacks and data loss. It runs across more than 200 public data centers worldwide and thousands of private edge sites, and is described as the largest in-line cloud security platform of its kind.

The company is building an AI-native enterprise, where people work alongside machine intelligence to tackle hard security problems. Its stated values are ownership and collaboration, trust through outcomes and impact, and a challenge culture that relies on regular feedback.

This is a principal engineering role on the control plane of the company Internet Access (ZIA) product. The work is about evolving the platform to handle very large scale using cloud-native, microservices-based architecture. The role reports to the Senior Director, Software Development Engineering, within the Engineering ZIA Core department.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for modernizing the ZIA control plane with API-first microservices, each aligned to a domain with clear ownership, across multiple regions using active-active, failover and disaster recovery designs
• Build and run low-latency, event-driven services from the API layer down to storage, using resilience patterns, progressive delivery (blue/green, canary and feature flags), GitOps (Argo CD or Flux) and safe rollout and rollback methods
• Raise engineering standards through reviews, testing, reusable paved-road patterns and governance of API and event contracts (versioning, consumer-driven contracts, schema registry, dead-letter queues). Work with Product, SRE, Security, Data and Architecture teams, and present designs to customers and partners
• Own reliability and operability of your services: define SLIs and SLOs (p95/p99 latency, availability), set SLO-based alerts, manage error budgets, lead incident response and postmortems, and build observability with distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger or Tempo) and structured logging
• Build security into microservices (OAuth2/OIDC, mTLS, service-to-service authorization, KMS or Vault), protect supply-chain integrity (SBOM, SLSA), and handle performance tuning, capacity planning, and cloud spend and autoscaling on AWS

Requirements

• Comfortable working in ambiguous settings, building the path as you go and turning unstructured problems into useful work
• Act like an owner who cares about the mission. You operate with integrity, move quickly, and can switch between high-level strategy and hands-on work
• Enjoy hard technical problems and want to deliver high-impact solutions
• Build strong trust with teammates, welcome continuous feedback, and speak candidly and respectfully to reach shared goals
• Keep learning with a growth mindset, actively seek feedback, and build skills on purpose to become a stronger teammate
• Foundational understanding of AI and ML technologies, with experience using, securing, or applying AI-driven solutions to improve outcomes in your area
• 12+ years in software development, including 4+ years building and running production microservices at significant scale. Proficiency in Go is required
• Deep experience with distributed systems and messaging. Kafka is preferred, and SQS or RabbitMQ is acceptable. Familiarity with CQRS and Event Sourcing where they fit the problem
• Kubernetes on AWS at scale (EKS preferred), solid Docker knowledge, Infrastructure-as-Code, and GitOps workflows
• Strong SQL design and scaling (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Amazon RDS or Aurora) and NoSQL design and scaling (Cassandra, MongoDB or DynamoDB). Familiarity with trade-offs in multi-region data, plus performance engineering and AWS cost optimization
• Broad reliability and security experience: SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, Prometheus metrics, OpenTelemetry tracing, SLO-based alerting, incident management, postmortems, service mesh (Istio or Linkerd), mTLS, OAuth2/OIDC, and secrets management (KMS or Vault)
• Preferred: Proven use of AI technologies and workflows to produce measurable gains in operational efficiency
• Preferred: Chaos engineering, advanced load and performance testing, fault injection, and disaster recovery drills, plus multi-region design skill (active-active, partitioning, replication, eventual consistency) and experience leading migrations (strangler patterns, domain decomposition)
• Preferred: Event contract governance with Avro or Protobuf and a schema registry, dead-letter queue handling strategies, and data replay tooling
• Preferred: Open-source contributions, technical talks, patents, or published design writing

Conditions

Hybrid role. You must work from the Santa Clara, CA office at least 3 days per week

Full-time position

Base pay range is $185,500 - $265,000 USD for US locations. Actual pay may be higher or lower depending on job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. The base range excludes commission, bonus, equity (if applicable) and benefits

The company complies with all applicable federal, state and local pay transparency rules

The company offers reasonable accommodations in its hiring process for candidates who are differently abled, have long-term or mental health conditions, hold sincerely held religious beliefs, are neurodivergent, or need pregnancy-related support

Benefits

• Health plans, vacation and sick time, parental leave, retirement options, education reimbursement, and in-office perks