About The Position
SonicWall is seeking an experienced Senior QA Manager to own end-to-end quality for SonicOS, the operating system powering its next-generation firewall products. This leadership role defines quality strategy, guides automation and test-infrastructure investments, and partners with Product Management, Development, Release Engineering, DevOps, and Support to ensure releases meet standards for reliability, security, and customer trust. The role shapes quality throughout the product lifecycle, from early design reviews and threat modeling through release readiness and post-release learning. The position leads QA strategy and release quality across major releases, patches, and hotfixes; provides technical leadership for firewall and network security features; and establishes comprehensive testing across functionality, performance, scale, high availability, upgrades, migrations, stability, and security scenarios. It also sets the direction for automation and test infrastructure, oversees quality metrics and release reviews, leads root-cause analysis of production issues, and builds and develops QA leadership and engineering teams.
Requirements
- 10+ years of total technical experience, including at least 2+ years in a management or leadership role.
- Strong background in testing firewall or network security products, or similar system software.
- Deep understanding of networking and security fundamentals, including TCP/IP, routing, NAT, VPN, high availability, IPS/DPI concepts, and authentication mechanisms.
- Experience owning quality for complex, large-scale system software releases.
- Proven leadership experience managing and scaling QA teams across geographies.
- Strong exposure to automation strategy and CI/CD-driven quality practices.
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence senior technical stakeholders.
Nice To Haves
- Prior experience with SonicOS or comparable firewall operating system platforms.
- Exposure to security compliance programs such as FIPS, Common Criteria, or SOC2.
- Experience testing in hybrid environments involving hardware, virtual, and cloud deployments.
- Experience handling customer escalations and field-issue root-cause analysis.
Responsibilities
- Define and continuously improve the QA strategy for SonicOS releases, patches, and hotfixes.
- Establish quality gates, entry and exit criteria, and release-readiness standards; drive risk-based testing and shift-left practices.
- Own release go/no-go decisions from a quality standpoint.
- Provide technical leadership for firewall features, including stateful firewall, NAT, VPN, routing, high availability, and security services.
- Review product requirements, design documents, and architecture proposals with a quality and security mindset.
- Define test strategies for functional correctness, end-to-end customer workflows, performance, scale, stress, high availability, upgrades and downgrades, configuration migrations, long-run stability, and security scenarios.
- Set the long-term UI, API, CLI, and end-to-end automation vision and measurable coverage goals.
- Partner with automation leads to build scalable frameworks integrated into CI/CD and improve test-suite stability and reliability.
- Own testbed strategy across hardware appliances, virtual firewalls, and cloud deployments; coordinate with infrastructure teams on environment availability, capacity, and reliability.
- Track quality metrics, including defect leakage, escape rate, regression effectiveness, automation ROI, and test flakiness.
- Lead release-readiness and quality reviews with senior stakeholders.
- Lead root-cause analysis for production escapes and systemic quality gaps, and turn field learnings into preventive improvements.
- Build, mentor, and retain QA managers, leads, and senior engineers; establish expectations, career paths, and technical growth plans.
- Influence engineering leadership and product managers to prioritize quality, reliability, and customer impact.
- Represent QA in leadership forums, customer escalations, and cross-functional reviews.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
