Staff Software Development Engineer (Microservices)

Description

The company makes cloud security software. Its Zero Trust Exchange platform connects users, devices and applications in any location, protecting customers 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 in the world.

The company is building an AI-native organization where people work alongside machine intelligence to tackle hard security problems. The team is customer-focused and works around three behaviors: ownership and collaboration, trust through results and impact, and openness to challenge and ongoing feedback.

This hybrid role is in Santa Clara, CA, with at least 3 days per week in the office. It reports to the Senior Director, Software Development Engineering, within the Engineering ZIA Core department. You will build, run and keep improving domain-aligned microservices for the company Internet Access (ZIA) control plane, owning services from design through deployment as the team moves toward cloud-native architecture at scale.

Responsibilities

• Build and run low-latency, event-driven microservices across the full stack, from API to storage, using resilience patterns such as circuit breakers, retries with jitter, back-pressure, idempotency, and sagas or outbox.
• Help prepare services for multi-region operation through sound data partitioning, stateless design, and limiting blast radius.
• Contribute to shared libraries, templates and runbooks that make service development, CI/CD, testing and delivery easier for everyone.
• Ship safely using GitOps tools such as Argo CD or Flux, progressive delivery with canary or blue-green releases and feature flags, and automated rollback policies.
• Instrument services with metrics, logs and distributed tracing. Define and track SLIs and SLOs.
• Take part in incident response, on-call rotations, failure-tested runbooks and postmortems.
• Work with Product, SRE, Security and Architecture on designs, tradeoffs, design reviews and clear technical docs and ADRs.
• Strengthen service security with OAuth2/OIDC, mTLS, service-to-service authorization and secrets management, and improve supply-chain integrity.
• Profile performance, guide capacity planning and autoscaling, and help reduce cloud cost for the services you own.

Requirements

• You take ownership and move comfortably between hands-on coding, technical design and production operations.
• You build pragmatically, iterating and shipping resilient software while balancing quality with speed to get measurable results.
• You favor simple, robust and maintainable cloud-native solutions, even when the underlying distributed systems problem is complex.
• You work well across functions with Product, SRE and Security, giving and taking feedback to build trust and raise engineering standards.
• You design for longevity and scale, linking everyday microservice work to high-availability, multi-region architecture and company-wide reliability goals.
• Foundational understanding of AI/ML technologies, with experience using, securing or proposing AI-driven solutions that improve outcomes in your area.
• 5+ years in software development, including 2+ years building and running production microservices. Proficiency in Go and solid fundamentals in testing, design and code quality.
• Kubernetes experience (EKS preferred), strong Docker fundamentals, experience delivering services on AWS, and familiarity with Git-based workflows, CI/CD, autoscaling and rollout patterns.
• Experience with Kafka or a similar message broker, strong SQL skills (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Amazon RDS or Aurora), and experience with at least one NoSQL store such as Cassandra, MongoDB or DynamoDB.
• Observability expertise across Prometheus metrics, logs and OpenTelemetry tracing, plus hands-on incident management.
• Working knowledge of service security (OAuth2/OIDC), mTLS and secrets management with tools such as KMS or Vault.
• Preferred qualifications: proven use of AI technologies and workflows to drive measurable operational efficiency.
• Preferred qualifications: hands-on experience with GitOps (Argo CD or Flux), feature flags and progressive delivery at scale. Familiarity with service mesh (Istio or Linkerd) and policy-driven traffic management is also preferred.
• Preferred qualifications: experience with chaos engineering, fault injection or DR drills, exposure to multi-region patterns, data consistency tradeoffs, and monolith-to-microservices migrations.
• Preferred qualifications: performance profiling and cloud cost optimization on AWS with basic FinOps awareness, plus open-source contributions, technical talks or strong technical writing.

Conditions

Base pay range is $133,000 - $190,000 USD. This is the target minimum and maximum for new hires across all US locations and may be higher or lower depending on skills, experience, and relevant education or training. It excludes commission, bonus, equity (if applicable) and benefits.

This is a full-time position, hybrid, based in Santa Clara, CA, with at least 3 days per week in the office.

The company follows all applicable federal, state and local pay transparency rules.

The company offers reasonable accommodations in recruiting for candidates who are differently abled, have long-term, mental health or religious needs, are neurodivergent, or need pregnancy-related support.

By applying, you agree to follow applicable laws, regulations and company policies, including those on security and privacy.

Benefits

• Multiple health plans.
• Vacation and sick time plans.
• Parental leave options.
• Retirement options.
• Education reimbursement.
• In-office perks.