Staff Escalation Engineer

About Zscaler

Zscaler accelerates digital transformation to ensure our customers can be more agile, efficient, resilient, and secure. As an AI-forward enterprise, we are constantly pushing the envelope, leveraging the world’s largest security data lake to power our cloud-native Zero Trust Exchange platform. This innovation protects our customers from cyberattacks and data loss by securely connecting users, devices, and applications in any location.

Here, impact in your role matters more than title and trust is built on results. We say, impact over activity. We seek innovators who actively use AI to amplify their impact and who thrive in an environment where we leverage intelligent systems to stay ahead of evolving threats. 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 value high-impact, high-accountability with a sense of urgency where you’re enabled to do your best work and embrace your potential. If you’re driven by purpose, thrive on solving complex challenges, and want to be part of the team that’s helping to secure the AI age, we invite you to bring your talents to Zscaler and 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