Staff Engineer in Test

We are seeking a highly skilled and technically strong Staff Engineer in Test to lead system level quality engineering efforts for networking, security and other enterprise readiness aspects of Infinia, DDN's large-scale distributed data platform.

In this role, you will be a senior technical authority responsible for planning and implementing test strategies and test infrastructures to ensure correctness, stability, performance, and resilience of Infinia's distributed architecture. You will work across core subsystems-including the I/O path, memory management, networking stack, scheduling layers, multi-tenant services, and NVMe-backed storage

patterns-to ensure platform quality at scale.

This is a hands-on, high-impact IC role for someone who can solve hard problems, automate at scale, leverage AI to improve velocity and elevate quality engineering across the organization.

Key Responsibilities:

Quality Engineering & System Validation

• Design detailed test strategies and validation plans for networking and security features for distributed system

• Create scalable, automated test suites that validate multi-tenant behavior, concurrency, data consistency, and system-level performance.

Automation Frameworks & Tooling

• Build and maintain robust automation using tools such as Pytest and container-based environments leveraging Docker, Jenkins, Kubernetes.

• Develop reusable automation templates, harnesses, and utilities to accelerate test creation and reduce engineering overhead.

Performance, Reliability & Scale Testing

• Construct and execute performance tests covering I/O throughput, system latency, NVMe access patterns, concurrency limits, and long-running workload stability.

• Use advanced tools (profilers, fuzzers, failure-injection frameworks, trace analyzers) to uncover issues in distributed workflows.

• Analyze CPU, memory, disk, and network utilization to diagnose performance bottlenecks and identify regression risks.

Cross-Functional Quality Leadership

• Work closely with architects, developers, release engineering, DevOps, and customer engineering to drive quality-first design decisions.

• Participate in feature design reviews, ensuring testability, observability, and resilience are built into system components.

• Lead root cause analysis (RCA) for complex issues and propose long-term improvements to engineering practices and platform stability.

Documentation & Quality Standards

• Produce clear, detailed test plans, automation guides, design-review feedback, and quality metrics reports.

• Contribute to the development and maintenance of internal QA standards, best practices, and. onboarding materials.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software quality engineering, with strong focus on distributed systems, system-level testing, or infrastructure platforms.

• Hands-on expertise in test automation using Python, Bash, and modern CI/CD tooling (Git, Jenkins, etc.).

• Strong understanding of:

• Distributed concurrency

• File systems and I/O stack behavior

• Storage performance analysis (NVMe, SPDK)

• Networking, tracing, and system observability

• Experience with large-scale performance testing, stress testing, and reliability validation.

• Demonstrated skill in diagnosing complex system issues across logs, traces, network captures, and profiling tools.

• ISTQB or equivalent certification preferred.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience validating large-scale data platforms, storage engines, or distributed scheduling systems.

• Experience with AI technologies in context of quality engineering, such as issue triaging, test generation, automation.

• Familiarity with observability technologies such as OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus.

• Background in compliance or security testing (e.g., access control, backup/restore workflows, Section 508/HIPAA/PCI).

• Contributions to open-source test frameworks or distributed systems validation tools.