Sr. Staff ML Engineer — Agentic AI & Digital Experience

Position Overview

Zscaler is the operator of the world’s largest security cloud, serving thousands of enterprise customers worldwide, including 45% of Fortune 500 companies. Founded in 2007, our mission is to make the cloud a safe place to do business while enabling digital transformation with agility, efficiency, and security. Named a Best Workplace in Technology by Fortune, we foster an inclusive and collaborative culture.

We’re looking for an experienced Sr. Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join our Digital Experience team on a hybrid schedule (based in our San Jose, CA office three days a week). Reporting to the Sr. Director of Software Engineering, you will own end-to-end AI delivery and help build production systems that power the future of cloud security.

Key Responsibilities

• Own agentic AI delivery end-to-end by framing high-impact use cases, designing agent workflows (tool use, planning, memory, context), and building frameworks across products.
• Evaluate and integrate state-of-the-art GenAI advances (e.g., LLMs/SLMs, retrieval, fine-tuning, inference optimization) to deliver reliable and cost-efficient production features.
• Design, implement, and operate scalable production systems, including microservices, data pipelines, orchestration, and caching.
• Partner with Product, UX, and customers to transform ambiguous challenges into measurable outcomes with clear SLAs, telemetry, and feedback loops.

Required Qualifications

• BS in Computer Science (or related field) with 7+ years of experience, or MS/PhD in Computer Science (or related field) with 6+ years solving real-world problems using AI/ML and distributed systems.
• Proficiency in programming, data structures, algorithms, and machine learning with exceptional problem-solving skills driven by first-principles thinking.
• Experience in the full lifecycle of ML models, including building, deployment, monitoring, and optimization.
• Hands-on experience with modern GenAI stacks (e.g., LangChain/LangGraph, CrewAI, vector stores, RAG, prompts/memory, evaluators).
• Expertise in designing and operating distributed microservices (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD pipelines, observability, AWS/GCP/Azure) and writing production-grade code in Python, Go, or Java.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience fine-tuning and deploying proprietary SLMs/LLMs at scale, focusing on optimizing latency, cost, safety, and evaluations.
• Experience delivering production-ready agentic systems, with expertise in context engineering and memory management strategies.
• Proven ability to design and implement high-performance, resilient systems with well-defined service-level objectives (SLOs).

Compensation

Base Pay Range: $147,000—$220,000 USD (This base salary range excludes commission/bonus/equity, if applicable.)

Benefits & Perks

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