Staff Software Development Engineer

<div class="content-intro"><p data-pm-slice="1 1 []">Zscaler (NASDAQ: ZS) accelerates digital transformation so customers can be more agile, efficient, resilient, and secure. The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform protects thousands of customers from cyberattacks and data loss by securely connecting users, devices, and applications in any location. Distributed across 200+ public data centers globally and thousands of private sites at the edge, the SASE-based Zero Trust Exchange is the world’s largest in-line cloud security platform.</p> <p>We believe the future of work is Human + AI and are building an AI-native enterprise where human potential is amplified by machine intelligence to solve the world’s hardest security challenges. Driven by deep customer obsession, we are committed to the mission, outcome, and to each other. We bring these commitments to life through three core behaviors: ownership and collaboration, trust through outcomes and impact, and a challenge culture with ongoing feedback. Ready to make an impact at the company pioneering security transformation in the AI era? Join us at Zscaler.</p></div><h5><strong>Role</strong></h5> <p>We are seeking an exceptional and technically grounded Senior Manager, Software Development Engineering to lead our core Data Loss Prevention (DLP) engineering team within the Zero Trust Exchange department. Based in San Jose, CA, and reporting to the Senior Director, Software Development Engineering, you will lead the architecture, design, and delivery of high-throughput, low-latency DLP engines, dictionary matching systems, and intelligent content inspection pipelines running in C across FreeBSD and Linux environments. In this role, you will balance strategic leadership with deep systems rigor, bridging deterministic inspection mechanisms with next-generation Named Entity Recognition (NER) and ML models while navigating real-time inline performance trade-offs.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h5><strong>What you'll do (Role Expectations)</strong></h5> <ul> <li>Manage, mentor, and grow a world-class team of systems software engineers and principal architects responsible for high-performance DLP engines, dictionary compilers, and distributed incident processing pipelines</li> <li>Own the technical direction and engineering execution for line-rate pattern matching, regular expression evaluators, custom dictionary compilers, exact data match (EDM), and indexed document matching (IDM) running in production proxy runtimes</li> <li>Guide the evaluation, operationalization, and performance boundary testing of Named Entity Recognition (NER) and ML models, balancing inspection accuracy and tokenization against strict network latency, compute complexity, and memory footprints</li> <li>Maintain exacting standards for multi-threaded C daemons on FreeBSD/Linux, architecting robust shared memory structures, high-performance Inter-Process Communication (IPC), lockless concurrency, and memory-safe subsystems</li> <li>Serve as the technical escalation authority for critical production issues—championing post-mortem core dump analysis, system profiling, and leak detection—while overseeing scalable DLP incident streaming, forensic logging, and enterprise SIEM/SOAR integrations</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h5><strong>Who You Are (Success Profile)</strong></h5> <p>&nbsp;</p> <ul> <li>You act like an owner, bringing a deep passion for the mission and a strong bias for action that allows you to seamlessly transition between high-level strategy and hands-on execution.</li> <li>You are a natural problem-solver who is energized by finding solutions to complex technical challenges, knowing that solving the hardest problems yields the greatest impact.</li> <li>You are a high-trust collaborator who champions transparency, embraces constructive feedback, and prioritizes team success to build deep, respectful partnerships.</li> <li>You think at scale, always connecting engineering efforts to the broader company mission and design