Is there a particular domain you'd like to get into? It sounds like you're wanting to build expertise in something other than CRUD app assembly, but my language recommendations might change based on whether that's embedded, game development, distributed systems, system administration, etc.

I don't think in your shoes I'd prioritize learning Zig for any of these domains, though, for a few reasons:

* It's not a pre-req for understanding some existing corpus of important software (which is a big reason for C and C++ in 2026) or the language of choice for some current hot domain (as Python is for AI).

* It's not memory-safe, which (whether via GC or Rust's borrow checker) is increasingly viewed as a critical security attribute.

* It's not stable yet, so I'd expect a certain amount of running to keep in place both in your learning and in avoiding bitrot in anything you write in it.

* From the outside, the community seems strangely hostile as well as elitist.

A few I might suggest instead: Rust (both as a language I personally like and as the most different from the ones you've already touched), Go (which is a good choice for employability), SQL (maybe you already know this one if you're doing CRUD stuff but you didn't list it), bash, and more Python and/or TypeScript.