Senior Software Development Engineer

Zscaler accelerates digital transformation so customers can be more agile, efficient, resilient, and secure. The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform protects thousands of customers from cyberattacks and data loss by securely connecting users, devices, and applications in any location.

As a hands-on Senior AI Engineer within Zscaler's IT AI/ML Engineering team in India, you will design, build, test, and operate production-grade AI applications used by employees and customers globally. Collaborating daily with a US-based technical lead and distributed teammates, you will own well-scoped projects end-to-end, specializing either in agents and retrieval systems or AI business solutions and platform support.

Responsibilities

• Design and build production-grade AI services, APIs, and retrieval pipelines in Python with clean, tested, and well-documented code.
• Lead scoped AI projects from design to launch, breaking down ambiguous business requirements into clear technical tasks.
• Integrate test sets, regression checks, tracing, and cost/latency tracking into every feature to ensure system reliability.
• Partner closely with global, cross-functional teams, share status transparently, review code, and mentor junior engineers.
• Provide L2 support for AI applications, administer enterprise AI platforms, write runbooks, and build automation to reduce repeat issues.

Requirements

• Foundational understanding of AI/ML technologies and experience leveraging, securing, or positioning AI-driven solutions to optimize outcomes within your functional domain
• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years of hands-on experience building applications with LLMs or ML services.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering (or equivalent experience) with strong Python skills and solid API/service design.
• Hands-on experience with prompt design, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and function calling or agent frameworks.
• Experience evaluating AI systems using test sets, regression checks, and tracing or monitoring tools.
• Working knowledge of cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure), Docker, CI/CD, and experience debugging and supporting production services.

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven ability to leverage AI technologies and workflows to drive operational efficiency, backed by exposure to how AI agents or models are built
• Experience with vector/graph databases, embeddings, rerankers, model serving, fine-tuning, or open-weight models.
• Familiarity with Model Context Protocol (MCP), tool-integration standards, and agent memory/context management.
• Experience administering enterprise AI platforms (e.g., Claude, OpenAI, Bedrock) or building custom Slack bots and web widgets.
• Proven experience running technical workshops, writing runbooks, or contributing to the community via open-source, publications, or talks.

Benefits

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