Principal DevOps Engineer

About Zscaler

Zscaler accelerates digital transformation to ensure our customers can be more agile, efficient, resilient, and secure. As an AI-forward enterprise, we are constantly pushing the envelope, leveraging the world's largest security data lake to power our cloud-native Zero Trust Exchange platform. This innovation protects our customers from cyberattacks and data loss by securely connecting users, devices, and applications in any location.

Here, impact in your role matters more than title and trust is built on results. We say, impact over activity. We seek innovators who actively use AI to amplify their impact and who thrive in an environment where we leverage intelligent systems to stay ahead of evolving threats. We believe in transparency and value constructive, honest debate - we're focused on getting to the best ideas, faster. We build high-performing teams that can make an impact quickly and with high quality. To do this, we are building a culture of execution centered on customer obsession, collaboration, ownership, and accountability.

We value high-impact, high-accountability with a sense of urgency where you're enabled to do your best work and embrace your potential. If you're driven by purpose, thrive on solving complex challenges, and want to be part of the team that's helping to secure the AI age, we invite you to bring your talents to Zscaler and help shape the future of cybersecurity.

Role

We are looking for a Principal DevOps Engineer to join our Zero Trust Exchange team. This is a hybrid role based in San Jose, CA 3 days a week, reporting to the Sr. Manager, Software Engineering. You'll own the day-to-day operational reliability of our Zero Trust Branch platform - building automated onboarding pipelines, maintaining Kubernetes-based infrastructure in AWS (including federal/IL5 environments), and leading on-call incident response through ServiceNow. As we rapidly scale our customer base, you'll be the engineer who ensures our GitOps workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud environments can keep up with that growth.

What you'll do (Role Expectations)

• Design and automate customer onboarding workflows that reduce provisioning time from days to hours, enabling the team to scale across hundreds of commercial and federal (IL5) tenants.
• Own and mature the on-call rotation and incident management process in ServiceNow - defining runbooks, escalation paths, and SLOs that drive mean-time-to-resolution down and keep platform availability above target.
• Build and maintain GitOps-driven CI/CD pipelines using GitLab and ArgoCD to enable safe, repeatable deployments to production Kubernetes clusters, minimizing human error and accelerating release velocity.
• Proactively identify and eliminate infrastructure reliability risks through monitoring, capacity planning, and automated remediation - catching problems before customers feel them.
• Establish operational standards and documentation that enable the broader engineering team to self-serve deployments and troubleshooting, reducing bottlenecks on the DevOps team as the organization scales.

Who You Are (Success Profile)

• You act like an owner. Your passion for the mission fuels your bias for action. You operate with integrity because you genuinely care about the outcome. You adapt to what's needed, navigating seamlessly between high-level strategy and hands-on execution.
• You are a high-trust collaborator. You are ambitious for the team, not just yourself. You embrace our challenge culture by giving and receiving ongoing feedback-knowing that candor delivered with clarity and respect is the truest form of teamwork and the fastest way to earn trust.
• You are a pragmatic builder. You are obsessed with creating, iterating, and shipping. You aren't afraid to roll up your sleeves and build the first version yourself, balancing the drive for technical excellence with the need to deliver value to users quickly.
• You lead with integrity. You do the right thing, even when it's hard. You hold yourself and others to a high standard of accountability and build trust by matching your words with consistent, transparent action.

What We're Looking for (Minimum Qualifications)

• U.S. Citizenship - required for access to federal cloud environments (IL5).
• Deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes and AWS - you'll be managing production clusters daily, not just dabbling.
• Experience with on-call rotations and incident management workflows - you've carried a pager, written runbooks, and driven postmortems.

What Will Make You Stand Out (Preferred Qualifications)

• Experience building CI/CD and GitOps pipelines (GitLab, ArgoCD, Docker, Makefile) - we rely heavily on automated, repeatable deployments and you'd hit the ground running.
• Working knowledge of RDBMS/SQL and SSO (SAML/OIDC) - these come up constantly in onboarding and troubleshooting, so familiarity means fewer ramp-up surprises.
• Exposure to OpenTelemetry (OTEL), CloudFuse, or NIAP/IL5 certification processes - understanding these gives you a head start in our federal environment and observability stack.

#LI-CM3

#LI-Hybrid

Compensation and Benefits

Zscaler's salary ranges are benchmarked and are determined by role and level. The base salary range for this full-time position is $185,500-$265,000 USD. This range excludes commission/bonus/equity and benefits.

At Zscaler, we are committed to building a team that reflects the communities we serve and the customers we work with. We offer comprehensive and inclusive benefits, including:

• Various health plans
• Time off plans for vacation and sick time
• Parental leave options
• Retirement options
• Education reimbursement
• In-office perks, and more!

Equal Opportunity Employer

Zscaler is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all individuals. We strive to create a workplace where employees are treated with respect and have the chance to succeed. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.