Senior Product Manager (AI / Data Classification)

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.

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Product Manager (AI / Data Classification) to join our Data Protection team. This is a hybrid role based in San Jose, CA (3 days onsite). While local candidates are preferred, we are open to remote candidates based on the West Coast for exceptional applicants.

We’re looking for a Product Manager to lead data classification capabilities within a Data Security platform. You’ll own the end-to-end product strategy for discovering and classifying sensitive data across cloud, on-prem data stores and SaaS applications, turning classification outcomes into actionable risk reduction for security, privacy, and compliance teams.

What You’ll Do (Role Expectations)

• Partner closely with a focused engineering, data science/ML, design, sales, and customer success to deliver accurate, scalable classification, clear policy outcomes, and measurable customer value
• Own the classification taxonomy, labeling standards, and policy model (custom categories, confidence thresholds, inheritance, overrides, exceptions)
• Drive accuracy improvements by managing precision/recall targets, sampling strategies, tuning workflows, and customer feedback loops
• Set requirements for scanning at enterprise scale (billions of objects, large tables), optimizing cost, latency, and coverage
• Define how the platform combines pattern-based detectors, NLP/ML, and LLM-assisted classification for structured and unstructured data

Who You Are (Success Profile)

• 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. You adapt to what’s needed, navigating seamlessly between high-level strategy and hands-on execution.
• You are a problem-solver. You seek out challenges because you are energized by finding solutions, 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 customer-obsessed. You build deep empathy for the customer—both internal and external—and anchor your decisions in solving their real-world problems. You champion their needs from start to finish, knowing their success is our success.
• You operate with urgency. You understand that in a high-growth environment, speed and quality are not mutually exclusive. You have a relentless focus on execution and a bias for action, delivering high-impact results quickly to win for the customer and the team.

What We’re Looking for (Minimum Qualifications)

• Product Management experience, with meaningful ownership of data security/privacy products. Product management experience can be substituted with data science experience
• Demonstrated experience shipping products that use AI/ML and/or LLMs in production, with a strong understanding of data classification approaches across structured and unstructured data
• Expertise in evaluation and quality measurement for classification systems and building/maintaining golden datasets
• Ability to design human-in-the-loop workflows for high-stakes labels, covering review/approval, exception handling, and audit trails
• Experience driving cost/performance tradeoffs for AI at scale, including token/compute budgeting, model selection, and managing latency for large corporations

What Will Make You Stand Out (Preferred Qualifications)

• Strong technical collaboration skills with ML engineering and data science
• Familiarity with embedding-based similarity and semantic retrieval for classification and deduping (vector DBs, ANN indexing, chunking strategies)
• Prior work in DSPM/DLP/CASB/insider risk where false negatives have high blast radius and you have designed processes to manage that risk