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Principal Rust Developer

Zscaler·Principal·On-site · San Jose, California·$182k–$260k USD

Posted Aug 8, 2026·zscaler.com

The Principal Rust Developer position is on the Platform Convergence Team, reporting to the Sr. Director, Software Engineering. The role is hybrid, based in San Jose, CA, and involves building a platform from the ground up designed to scale to hundreds of millions of users with high reliability and low latency by designing and implementing distributed systems and core infrastructure components.

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.

Minimum 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.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with systems languages like C/C++ or Go, particularly in performance-critical environments.
Familiarity with Linux networking stacks, kernel-space technologies such as eBPF or DPDK, and Kubernetes networking or service meshes.
Hands-on experience with gRPC, Protobufs, and L2–L4 networking protocols including TCP/IP, QUIC, or routing encapsulations.

Benefits

Various health plans
Time off plans for vacation and sick time
Parental leave options
Retirement options
Education reimbursement
In-office perks