Staff Escalation Engineer

About Zscaler

Zscaler is a pioneer and global leader in zero trust security. The world’s largest businesses, critical infrastructure organizations, and government agencies rely on Zscaler to secure users, branches, applications, data & devices, and to accelerate digital transformation initiatives. Distributed across more than 160 data centers globally, the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform combined with advanced AI combats billions of cyber threats and policy violations every day and unlocks productivity gains for modern enterprises by reducing costs and complexity.

Here, impact in your role matters more than title and trust is built on results. We believe in transparency and value constructive, honest debate—we’re focused on getting to the best ideas, faster. We build high-performing teams that can make an impact quickly and with high quality. To do this, we are building a culture of execution centered on customer obsession, collaboration, ownership and accountability. 

We champion an “AI Forward, People First” philosophy to help us accelerate and innovate, empowering our people to embrace their potential. If you’re driven by purpose, thrive on solving complex challenges and want to make a positive difference on a global scale, we invite you to bring your talents to Zscaler to help shape the future of cybersecurity.

Role

We are looking for a Staff Escalation Engineer to join our Shared Platform Services team. This is a hybrid role based out of our San Jose, CA office (3 days a week), reporting to the Sr. Manager, Software Engineering QA. You will be instrumental in taking the Zscaler Client Connector Cloud service to the next level in terms of reliability, availability, and scalability. As part of the team that built the world’s largest cloud security platform, you will bring your vision and passion to enable organizations worldwide to harness speed and agility with a cloud-first strategy.

What you’ll do (Role Expectations)

• Own and resolve escalated cloud incidents end-to-end, including impact analysis, debugging, implementing solutions, and communicating with stakeholders

• Collaborate with development, security, and operations to design and implement code/configuration fixes for complex system issues

• Monitor system health, performance, and security via PagerDuty and enhance alerting to meet SLOs

• Build diagnostic tools, dashboards, and documentation to enable faster, more effective incident resolution across the team

• Lead production service ownership and supportability by deploying critical fixes, making key deployment decisions, and responding to high-pressure off-hours events

Who You Are (Success Profile)

• You thrive in ambiguity. You're comfortable building the path as you walk it. You thrive in a dynamic environment, seeing ambiguity not as a hindrance, but as the raw material to build something meaningful.

• You act like an owner. Your passion for the mission fuels your bias for action. You operate with integrity because you genuinely care about the outcome. True ownership involves leveraging dynamic range: the ability to navigate seamlessly between high-level strategy and hands-on execution.

• You are a problem-solver. You love running towards the challenges because you are laser-focused on finding the solution, knowing that solving the hard problems delivers the biggest impact.

• You are a high-trust collaborator. You are ambitious for the team, not just yourself. You embrace our challenge culture by giving and receiving ongoing feedback—knowing that candor delivered with clarity and respect is the truest form of teamwork and the fastest way to earn trust.

• You are a learner. You have a true growth mindset and are obsessed with your own development, actively seeking feedback to become a better partner and a stronger teammate. You love what you do and you do it with purpose.

What We’re Looking for (Minimum Qualifications)

• Expert troubleshooting, debugging, and root-cause analysis for complex, high-priority incidents, with experience using CPU/memory profilers to diagnose resource exhaustion

• Strong hands-on skills in Python, Bash, and Java; cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, Azure); and IaC/configuration tools (Terraform, Ansible)

• Ability to write complex MySQL queries and generate business reports

• Experience with authentication protocols such as SAML and OAuth

• Solid networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, UDP, ICMP) and debugging with Postman and packet captures, along with proficiency in monitoring tools like Grafana