Staff Site Reliability Engineer (Production Engineer)- Federal

The role

This person will own the reliability and performance of Zscaler's high-throughput bare-metal and cloud infrastructure across a global, multi-region fleet. The role is software-first: writing production code and automation, leading incident response, and reducing reactive work.

What you will do

• Maintain high availability across large-scale bare-metal Linux/BSD fleets, Kubernetes clusters, and custom routing stacks with Engineering and Networking teams
• Lead full-cycle incident response with cross-stack troubleshooting using low-level OS and network tools
• Automate infrastructure lifecycle, provisioning, configuration and releases using Ansible, Python and Go
• Quantify operational toil and convert recurring manual work into version-controlled, testable automation
• Own telemetry (metrics, logs, traces) with Prometheus and OpenTelemetry
• Define and enforce SLOs and error budgets to reduce alert noise
• Perform architectural reviews, OS/kernel upgrades, capacity and performance tuning
• Run strict CI/CD validation before production rollouts and embed operability standards into service design

Required qualifications

• US citizenship required (due to the nature of assigned customers)
• Foundational understanding of AI/ML technologies and experience leveraging, securing, or positioning AI-driven solutions within your functional domain
• 5+ years in Site Reliability Engineering, Production Engineering, or Systems Engineering on high-scale, low-latency production platforms
• Ability to write and debug code live in Python, Go, or Bash, covering core logic and data structures
• Hands-on experience writing Ansible playbooks/tasks for infrastructure automation
• Deep knowledge of Linux OS internals and kernel troubleshooting (inodes, open file descriptors, process states, df vs du discrepancies)
• Understanding of networking protocols and packet-level analysis, including DNS, TLS handshakes, TCP/IP and tcpdump

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience operating and managing FreeBSD / BSD operating systems in production
• Expertise running, scaling and troubleshooting Kubernetes clusters in high-traffic, low-latency environments
• Experience with workflow orchestration platforms (Temporal or similar)
• Experience with Prometheus / OpenTelemetry, or AI/ML and AIOps tools for automated root-cause analysis

Benefits

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

Before you apply

• US citizenship is required

About the company

Zscaler is a security company whose Zero Trust Exchange platform protects customers from cyberattacks and data loss. Its SASE-based platform runs across 200+ public data centers globally and thousands of private edge sites.