Staff Software Development Engineer - AI Engineer

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 160+ public exchanges globally and thousands of private exchanges at the edge, the SASE-based Zero Trust Exchange is the world’s largest in-line cloud security platform.

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.

Role

• Build and scale the agentic layer of the AI Native - Product Operations Platform by designing production-grade AI systems, reusable platform capabilities, and reliable execution patterns
• Develop across FastAPI, NextJS, and Postgres while applying practical knowledge of RAG architectures, embeddings, vector retrieval, agent orchestration, and workflow state management
• Design and implement AI engineering harnesses for prompt testing, agent debugging, workflow replay, evaluation, regression testing, tracing, and controlled experimentation
• Build and maintain graph-based agent workflows, including multi-step reasoning flows, tool-calling paths, branching logic, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and stateful execution patterns
• Implement standards, patterns, and guardrails to ensure AI development on the platform remains scalable, reliable, observable, and cohesive

• You are a pragmatic builder with a passion for rolling up your sleeves to create, iterate, and ship production-grade software.
• You thrive in ambiguity and fast-paced environments, maintaining focus and execution velocity amidst rapid change.
• You act like an owner, bringing deep accountability, a strong bias for action, and end-to-end execution to every project.
• You are a high-trust collaborator who excels at partnering with cross-functional teams to translate business needs into technical solutions.
• You champion simplicity, with a proven ability to distill complex technical problems and AI architectures into clean, actionable plans.

• 5+ years of industry experience with last 2-3 years focused on building or working with AI development harnesses, including test harnesses, evaluation pipelines, workflow replay tools, tracing, observability, and prompt or agent regression testing
• Strong hands-on software engineering experience with FastAPI, NextJS, and Postgres, including building application stacks end-to-end
• Proven experience building and deploying agentic AI systems, RAG architectures, embeddings, and vector retrieval systems in production environments
• Familiarity with prompt engineering, orchestration patterns, agent workflows, graph-based execution models, and evaluation frameworks or guardrails
• Practical understanding of agentic loops, including planning, retrieval, tool execution, validation, retry handling, reflection, and termination criteria

The rest of this description is on the employer’s own page.