Staff ML Engineer — AI for Cloud Security (Remote)

Zscaler; Bellevue, Dallas, New York, Santa Clara (WA, TX, NY, CA); Hybrid; USD 152,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Zscaler is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer to join the Artificial Intelligence Guard team. The role is remote within the United States with a hybrid preference for Santa Clara, CA, reporting to the Director of AI and ML Engineering.

You will design, build, and deploy ML pipelines powering our cloud security platform with high-scale data processing. You will develop deep learning models for security, adapt open-weight LLMs, and optimize deployment for low latency and cost.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of applied ML experience in relevant field.
• Strong Python and DL frameworks (PyTorch/TF/JAX).
• Experience training/fine-tuning LLMs and production deployment.
• U.S. citizenship due to customer scope.

Responsibilities

• Build and deploy end-to-end ML pipelines spanning data curation, training/fine‑tuning, evaluation, and high-scale serving.
• Develop deep learning models for security use cases, including transformer‑based classifiers, embedding models, and sequence modeling across high‑volume traffic data.
• Adapt, fine‑tune, and productionize open‑weight LLMs and small language models using techniques such as LoRA/QLoRA, instruction tuning, and distillation.
• Optimize models for production through quantization, batching, and high‑throughput serving with frameworks like Hugging Face, PEFT, vLLM, TensorRT‑LLM, and ONNX Runtime to balance latency, cost, and quality.
• Architect and operationalize robust ML services across cloud platforms (AWS, GCP) leveraging cloud‑native microservice architectures.

Skills

ML frameworks

Python

LLM training

Production deployment

U.S. citizenship

Education

Degree in CS/ML/Math/Engineering

Job description

Zscaler is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer to join the Artificial Intelligence Guard team. The role is remote within the United States with a hybrid preference for Santa Clara, CA, reporting to the Director of AI and ML Engineering.

You will design, build, and deploy ML pipelines powering our cloud security platform with high-scale data processing. You will develop deep learning models for security, adapt open-weight LLMs, and optimize deployment for low latency and cost.