Senior Staff Windows Engineer - C++ & AI-Driven Security

Zscaler; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 225,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health plans

Time off plans for vacation and sick

Parental leave options

Retirement options

Education reimbursement

In-office perks

Job summary

Zscaler in San Jose, CA seeks a Senior Staff Software Development Engineer to advance the Client Connector Agent (CCA) on Windows. You will own core service-layer components, including RPC, session handling, and data pipelines, ensuring high performance, scalability, and maintainability across enterprise environments.

You will tackle complex production issues, guide a team of engineers, and contribute to Windows systems programming within the Zero Trust Exchange group.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of production software engineering experience with strong C++ (C++14/17) expertise.
• Solid grasp of Windows internals including services, user sessions, security tokens, IPC, and process/thread lifetime.
• Experience debugging multithreaded C++ including races, deadlocks, iterator invalidation, and use-after-free.
• Proficiency with diagnostic tools like WinDbg, ETW, Process Monitor, and crash dump analysis.
• Track record of shipping and maintaining an enterprise desktop or endpoint product.
• Foundational understanding of AI/ML technologies and experience leveraging, securing, or positioning AI-driven solutions.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

C++ proficiency (C++14/17)

Windows internals

Multithreaded debugging

Diagnostic tools

Enterprise desktop/endpoint product

Tools

WinDbg

ETW

Process Monitor

Job description

Zscaler in San Jose, CA seeks a Senior Staff Software Development Engineer to advance the Client Connector Agent (CCA) on Windows. You will own core service-layer components, including RPC, session handling, and data pipelines, ensuring high performance, scalability, and maintainability across enterprise environments.

You will tackle complex production issues, guide a team of engineers, and contribute to Windows systems programming within the Zero Trust Exchange group.