Principal Software Development Engineer in Test (Performance & Bare-Metal)

Akamai•Cambridge, MA

2d•$169,300 - $304,700•Hybrid

About The Position

Join our Compute team! Our team's mission is to accelerate innovation by making computing simple, scalable, accessible, and affordable for all. We provide the infrastructure and services that enable developers to build next-generation applications. We take ownership of the design and development of core compute interfaces, virtualization management, APIs, and low-level platform services. As a Principal Software Development Engineer in Test, you will own VM/fleet test strategy, performance quality gates, and hypervisor behavior validation across the IaaS platform.

Requirements

12 years in testing, including performance testing, hypervisor platforms, and systems engineering or its equivalent
Possess experience in KVM/QEMU/libvirt internals, VM-exits, and NUMA/cache effects on performance.
Have experience in debug across architectures (x86, ARM) on bare metal and emulated environments, isolating failure root causes.
Have good Linux fundamentals: scheduler, memory management, I/O subsystems, storage architectures, and block devices.
Demonstrate statistical thinking: experimental design, baseline analysis, variance control, and stakeholder communication.
Have proficiency in Linux perf, VTune, eBPF, Bash, Jenkins, and SaltStack.

Responsibilities

Defining and owning test strategy for hypervisor behavior, VM performance, and fleet-level quality gates; mentoring SDETs on statistical rigor and systems-level testing.
Designing reproducible test environments that emulate bare-metal VM conditions using containers, validating data integrity, without requiring physical hardware.
Developing automated performance benchmarks with statistical baselines, change-point detection, and regression gating for CI/CD pipelines.
Collaborating with product and SRE to define SLO measurement and validate deployment safety and rollback strategies.
Writing test harnesses and performance analysis pipelines in Go, Python, and Perl.