Senior Staff Software Development Engineer, Data Forwarding Plane (Rust)

Rust jobs in India are still uncommon, and this one is at the low level end rather than the web services end. Zscaler wants a data forwarding plane built in Rust: the component that moves traffic at low latency and high throughput, using async and await through Tokio or async-std for efficient I/O. Around it sit gRPC based services that connect the forwarding plane to control and orchestration layers, and the performance work runs across both kernel space and user space with profiling tools. This is the platform convergence department, the same group merging Zscaler's product stacks. At 7 or more years with extensive Rust specifically, the bar is high, but the work is genuinely systems programming rather than Rust used as a general purpose language.

The employer asks for 7 or more years of software development experience with extensive coding in Rust, particularly systems programming and async frameworks such as Tokio or async-std. Required: proven expertise building resilient, observable and horizontally scalable distributed systems; a strong grasp of Linux fundamentals including networking, namespaces, sockets and kernel to user space interaction; and proficiency with container based environments, Git, CI and CD workflows and performance instrumentation.

The day to day: designing and building the low latency, high throughput data forwarding plane; developing distributed systems with a focus on concurrency, fault tolerance and messaging; implementing and maintaining gRPC based APIs and services that integrate forwarding plane capability with control and orchestration layers; optimising performance through profiling across kernel and user space; and taking part in code reviews, system design discussions, technical documentation and mentoring.

Location is Bangalore or Hyderabad on a hybrid basis, reporting to a Senior Director of Software Engineering in the platform convergence department.

Good fit if your Rust is real systems work and you want networking data path problems. Not a fit if your Rust experience is limited to side projects or web backends: the posting asks for extensive production coding in it.