Senior Director of Production Engineering-Observability & Telemetry Platforms

Zscaler (NASDAQ: ZS) 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. Distributed across 160+ public exchanges globally and thousands of private exchanges at the edge, the SASE-based Zero Trust Exchange is the world’s largest in-line cloud security platform. We believe the future of work is Human + AI and are building an AI-native enterprise where human potential is amplified by machine intelligence to solve the world’s hardest security challenges. Driven by deep customer obsession, we are committed to the mission, outcome, and to each other. We bring these commitments to life through three core behaviors: ownership and collaboration, trust through outcomes and impact, and a challenge culture with ongoing feedback. Ready to make an impact at the company pioneering security transformation in the AI era? Join us at Zscaler. Role We are seeking an exceptional, battle-tested engineering executive to join us as Senior Director of Production Engineering. This role is for San Jose, CA (hybrid three days a week) reporting to executive engineering leadership and hold end-to-end strategic, technical, and operational ownership of our distributed Telemetry Pipelines and enterprise-wide Observability Platform. Our cloud platform operates at an immense global scale, processing hundreds of billions of transactions and petabytes of telemetry data daily. You will be responsible for defining and executing our multi-year vision, modernizing our observability architecture, driving platform reliability, and empowering globally distributed engineering organizations with real-time insights into availability, performance, and user experience. This high-visibility leadership role requires an outstanding combination of visionary systems architecture, operational rigor, and deep, empathetic people leadership. What you'll do (Role Expectations) Define the long-term roadmap and architectural strategy for the global Observability Platform, driving the strategic consolidation and modernization of monitoring stacks on open standards like OpenTelemetry to optimize total cost of ownership Architect, scale, and optimize high-throughput, low-latency telemetry ingestion and processing pipelines handling petabyte-scale streaming data to ensure fault tolerance, durability, and cost efficiency Optimize platform performance and resource utilization to maintain industry-leading service margins while handling aggressive year-over-year telemetry volume growth Partner with Site Reliability Engineering, Core Product, and incident management teams to establish standardized SLOs, enforce error budgets, and ensure high-fidelity alerting with streamlined escalation workflows Lead, mentor, and inspire a world-class engineering organization across multiple global sites while fostering an inclusive, accountable culture focused on technical curiosity and zero-toil automation Act as a trusted partner to Product Management, Information Security, and Customer Support leadership to align operational telemetry with customer business outcomes Who You Are (Success Profile) An experienced, empathetic leader who thrives on developing high-performing, diverse engineering teams and mentoring managers and technical leaders. A strategic thinker with a proven track record of managing large organizations and driving consensus across complex, matrixed business environments. A culture champion who fosters psychological safety, transparency, continuous learning, and a passion for engineering excellence. An operational perfectionist who believes in deep ownership, automation of repetitive toil, and building resilient, fault-tolerant architectures. A collaborative partner who can seamlessly bridge the gap between technical details and high-level executive business objectives. What We're Looking for (Minimum Qualifications) Experience leveraging generative AI tools, AI/ML models, or intelligent agents to optimize production engineering workflows, automate incident response toil, or enhance predictive observability analytics Progressive engineering leadership experience totaling 7+ years managing managers, technical leads, and distributed engineering organizations of 30+ engineers within hyper-scale SaaS, cloud provider, or high-transaction distributed systems environments Deep subject matter expertise in modern observability and telemetry systems, including distributed tracing, high-cardinality metrics engines, distributed log analytics, and telemetry routing using technologies such as OpenTelemetry, Kafka, Flink, Vector, VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, Prometheus, ClickHouse, or OpenSearch Strong architectural foundation in cloud-native paradigms, container orchestration with Kubernetes, and microservices, combined with a practical grasp of Site Reliability Engineering methodologies and incident command structures Proven track record of influencing executive stakeholders and driving cross-functional alignment, with the ability to work on-site at Headquarters at least 3 days a week What Will Make You Stand Out (Preferred Qualifications) Advanced experience with compliance, data retention, PII masking, and data governance requirements within large-scale logging and telemetry environments Active contribution to open-source communities in the observability or telemetry space, such as OpenTelemetry or Prometheus Experience designing and implementing chaos engineering practices or automated disaster recovery testing at scale #LI-Hybrid #LI-CM3 Zscaler’s salary ranges are benchmarked and are determined by role and level. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations an