Senior Staff SDET
Palo Alto Networks · Santa Clara, CA · 1 mo ago
HybridEngineeringFull-time
About the role
We are seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to join our team. This role is part of our commitment to building high-impact internal tools and test infrastructure for complex distributed systems.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement scalable automation frameworks and tooling for validating cloud-native services.
- Build reusable components for provisioning, configuring, and managing enterprise-scale test environments across Linux and Windows systems.
- Own and enhance CI/CD pipelines supporting internal testing infrastructure using GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, or similar technologies.
- Emulate complex customer environments, including DNS, PKI, firewall configurations, certificate lifecycle management, identity systems, and diverse operating system distributions.
- Partner with Development, DevOps, and Security teams to ensure services are designed with testability, scalability, and operational reliability in mind.
- Participate in architecture discussions, technical design reviews, and code reviews to improve automation infrastructure and engineering efficiency.
- Mentor engineers on designing testable, scalable features and guide teams in selecting the appropriate testing strategies to support efficient deployment pipelines.
- Identify quality gaps and drive improvements to automation coverage, reliability, and developer workflows.
- Design, implement, and maintain automation frameworks, internal tooling, and test infrastructure that enable engineering teams to deliver software with confidence.
- Work closely with engineering teams and product owners to ensure features are designed with clear, testable acceptance criteria and quality built into the development process.
- Review and influence testing strategies for complex features and distributed systems.
- Support developers in designing and building sophisticated end-to-end testing scenarios.
- Analyze quality trends and drive improvements that increase engineering efficiency, product quality, and release confidence.
Qualifications
- 5+ years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, test automation, SDET, or related backend engineering roles with a strong focus on automation and quality.
- Strong software engineering skills in Python, Java, or Golang.
- Experience designing, building, and evolving automation frameworks for backend services and distributed systems.
- Strong understanding of Linux/Unix and Windows operating system fundamentals.
- Working knowledge of networking protocols (TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/S); experience with PKI, certificate management, or identity infrastructure is highly desirable.
- Hands-on experience with microservices architectures, distributed systems, and system integration testing.
- Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using GitLab CI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or similar technologies.
- Experience working in containerized environments using Docker and Kubernetes.
- Experience emulating complex enterprise customer environments.
- Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code technologies such as Terraform and Ansible.
- Experience with performance testing tools such as JMeter, Gatling, or custom performance frameworks.
- Experience with public cloud platforms, with GCP preferred; AWS or Azure experience is also valuable.
- Experience building developer productivity tools, automation platforms, or internal engineering frameworks.
- Strong debugging and root cause analysis skills across application, infrastructure, networking, and cloud environments.
- Experience building robust, scalable automation frameworks and testing infrastructure.
- Experience managing Linux-based virtual machines and enterprise-scale test environments.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to quickly understand complex distributed systems.
- Demonstrated ability to lead technically challenging initiatives and influence engineering decisions across multiple teams through technical expertise and collaboration.
- Self-motivated, able to work independently, prioritize effectively, and thrive in a fast-paced engineering environment.
- Able to write clean, maintainable, well-documented code following engineering best practices.