About this role
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
We are looking for a Senior Staff Software Development Engineer to join our team. This is a San Jose, CA role, reporting to the Director, Software Development Engineering in the Zero Trust Exchange department. We are hiring a Senior Staff Software Development Engineer to drive the evolution of our Client Connector Agent (CCA), a critical Windows client that provides secure connectivity, tunneling, and session management across enterprise and VDI environments. In this role, you will own core service-layer components including RPC, user session handling, and data pipelines to ensure CCA remains performant, scalable, resilient, and maintainable.
What you’ll do (Role Expectations)
• Design and implement features across the CCA service, user-mode UI, and supporting subsystems including the RPC server, session handler, data handler, and tunnel telemetry
• Diagnose and fix complex production issues such as service crashes, race conditions, lifetime bugs, and cross-process synchronization problems
• Improve reliability of long-running Windows service code including cleanup/shutdown paths and inter-process communication
• Work on VDI-specific flows including ZCC VDI SMB tunnel traffic accounting and session lifecycle management
• Review peers' code, raise the quality bar, and mentor other engineers on Windows systems programming
Who You Are (Success Profile)
• You thrive in ambiguity and see dynamic, complex environments as an opportunity to build meaningful solutions.
• You act like an owner, driving initiatives forward with passion, integrity, and a strong bias for action.
• You are a high-trust collaborator who embraces a challenge culture with clear, respectful, and constructive feedback.
• You are customer-obsessed, grounding engineering decisions in deep empathy to solve real-world problems.
• You champion simplicity by distilling complex techni