Principal Rust Engineer: Low-Latency Distributed Systems

Zscaler; San Jose (CA); Hybrid; USD 182,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health plans

Time off plans

Parental leave options

Retirement options

Education reimbursement

In‑office perks

Job summary

Zscaler is seeking a Principal Rust Developer to join our Platform Convergence Team in a hybrid role based in San Jose, CA. You will design and implement distributed infrastructure, build a low-latency data forwarding plane in Rust, and collaborate with stakeholders to scale a cloud-native platform.

You will mentor engineers, participate in code reviews, and optimize performance across kernel and user space while leveraging gRPC APIs and modern tooling in a fast-paced security-centric

Qualifications

• Extensive experience coding with Rust, particularly in systems programming and async frameworks like Tokio or async-std.
• Proven expertise in building resilient, observable, and horizontally scalable distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of Linux fundamentals, including networking, namespaces, sockets, and kernel-user space interaction
• Proficiency in container-based environments, Git, CI/CD workflows, and performance instrumentation

Responsibilities

• Design and build a low-latency, high-throughput data forwarding plane using Rust, leveraging its async/await model for efficient I/O and service-oriented infrastructure
• Develop distributed, scalable systems with a focus on concurrency, fault tolerance, and messaging
• Implement and maintain gRPC-based APIs and services to integrate forwarding plane capabilities with control and orchestration layers
• Optimize system performance through profiling tools across kernel-space and user-space
• Engage in code reviews, system design discussions, technical documentation, and mentoring junior engineers

Skills

Rust

Distributed systems

Linux fundamentals

Containerization

Git

CI/CD

Performance instrumentation

Tools

gRPC

Protobufs

Kubernetes networking

eBPF

DPDK

Kubernetes

Job description

Zscaler is seeking a Principal Rust Developer to join our Platform Convergence Team in a hybrid role based in San Jose, CA. You will design and implement distributed infrastructure, build a low-latency data forwarding plane in Rust, and collaborate with stakeholders to scale a cloud-native platform.

You will mentor engineers, participate in code reviews, and optimize performance across kernel and user space while leveraging gRPC APIs and modern tooling in a fast-paced security-centric