Staff Software Development Engineer

Description

The company makes a cloud security platform, the Zero Trust Exchange, that connects users, devices and applications from any location. 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 team is building an AI-native enterprise in which people work alongside machine intelligence to tackle hard security problems. The company operates on three core behaviors: ownership and collaboration, trust through outcomes and impact, and a challenge culture with regular feedback.

This is a Staff Software Development Engineer role based in Santa Clara, CA, reporting to the Senior Director, Software Development Engineering within the Zero Trust Exchange department. You will lead the design and build of scalable, resilient and secure control plane platform services that power the Zero Trust Exchange. You will shape architecture, influence technical direction across teams, and deliver platform features that improve reliability, operability and developer speed. The ideal candidate has deep distributed systems knowledge, strong cross-functional leadership and a practical, execution-first approach.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture, design and delivery of large-scale control plane and platform services, focusing on scalability, availability, security and operational quality
• Guide complex initiatives that span several teams, get stakeholders aligned on architecture and execution plans, and keep delivery on track against business and engineering priorities
• Find and fix bottlenecks, reliability risks and architectural gaps in distributed systems, improving performance, observability and long-term maintainability
• Raise the technical bar through design reviews, code reviews, engineering best practices and hands-on mentoring of senior engineers across the organization
• Assess and adopt emerging technologies, including Agentic AI and AI-assisted engineering workflows where they fit, to boost developer productivity, system intelligence and product outcomes

Requirements

• Act like an owner: bring a strong commitment to the mission and a bias for action, moving between high-level architecture and hands-on execution to deliver outcomes you can stand behind
• Solve problems: enjoy hard challenges and design elegant, scalable solutions with the greatest organizational impact
• Collaborate with high trust: work toward collective success and give and receive candid, respectful feedback in a challenge culture
• Keep learning: pursue growth, seek feedback and develop as a technical leader and teammate
• Favor simplicity: turn complex distributed systems problems into clear, actionable engineering plans
• Show curiosity about AI tools and a record of adopting new technologies to improve daily workflows and problem-solving
• Have 5+ years of software engineering experience, including significant work designing and building large-scale distributed systems and backend platform services
• Have deep expertise in system design, microservices, API design, data modeling, and running highly available, fault-tolerant services in production
• Be strongly proficient in at least one modern language such as Java, Go or Python, with a record of shipping production-grade software
• Have led complex technical initiatives across multiple teams, driven architectural decisions and shaped engineering direction beyond your own team
• Have a strong grasp of cloud-native technologies, observability, reliability engineering and secure software development practices
• Nice to have: show measurable operational efficiency gains from using AI technologies and workflows
• Nice to have: have applied AI-forward engineering practices such as developer copilots, intelligent automation, AI-assisted incident analysis, or ML/LLM-powered platform capabilities to improve productivity or product outcomes
• Nice to have: have built control plane, policy, identity, security or other mission-critical platform systems in a SaaS or cybersecurity setting, with Kubernetes, PAM or IGA
• Nice to have: have mentored senior engineers and been a recognized technical leader for architecture, operational excellence and engineering standards across an organization

Conditions

Base pay range is $152,000 - $190,000 USD. This range covers new hire target minimum and maximum for US locations and may be higher or lower depending on skills, experience and education or training

The base salary excludes commission, bonus, equity (if applicable) and benefits

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

Hybrid working model; the company offers accommodations in recruiting for candidates who need them, and applicants must follow applicable laws and company policies on security and privacy

Benefits

• Various health plans
• Vacation and sick time off plans
• Parental leave options
• Retirement options
• Education reimbursement
• In-office perks and more