Senior Software QA Engineer - Connectors & I/O Performance

Ocient Inc.•Only, TN

5d•Remote

About The Position

Ocient is seeking a Senior Software QA Engineer to join the Connectors, Integrations, and I/O Performance domain. This role focuses on validating correctness, performance, stability, and customer-facing behavior of Ocient’s database drivers (JDBC, Python), client integrations, and high-throughput I/O paths. This is a hands-on, technically deep QA role for engineers who enjoy breaking complex systems, reasoning about performance bottlenecks, and partnering closely with developers to prevent regressions before customers ever see them.

Requirements

4-6+ years of experience in software QA with a strong systems focus.
Experience testing JDBC / Python / database drivers or client SDKs.
Deep experience testing database systems, drivers, APIs, or distributed systems.
Strong SQL skills and understanding of query execution, result materialization, and client-server interaction models.
Experience validating I/O performance-sensitive systems, including benchmarking, regression detection, and workload comparison.
Proficiency in Java and Python for test automation, data validation, and performance tooling.
Comfortable working in Linux environments, reading logs, using command-line tools, and debugging failures across system boundaries.
Strong analytical skills with the ability to own ambiguous, cross-component problems and drive them to resolution.

Nice To Haves

Significant experience developing test applications for Database APIs, Integrations, and Drivers, particularly those interfacing with the JDBC or ODBC API.
Experience developing and maintaining test applications for SSO integrations such as Okta/EntraID/Google.
Experience testing or validating integrations with Apache Spark, distributed compute engines, or downstream analytics frameworks that interact with databases via JDBC or custom connectors.
Familiarity with networking concepts (latency, throughput, batching, backpressure, serialization costs).
Experience validating large result sets, streaming queries, pagination, and memory-sensitive I/O paths.
Experience benchmarking or validating indexing strategies, access paths, and data layout choices in analytical or distributed database systems.
Exposure to distributed database internals, query plans, execution pipelines, or storage engines.
Ability to reason about CPU, memory, and I/O tradeoffs when diagnosing performance issues.
A proactive mindset — comfortable questioning assumptions, proposing new test strategies, and preventing regressions.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, especially when explaining complex failures to engineering and product teams.
Desire to work in a fast-paced startup environment with high ownership and impact.

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end QA strategy for database connectors and integrations, including JDBC, Python drivers, Single Sign On integrations, and third-party tools including but not limited to Metabase, Tableau, and DBeaver.
Design and execute functional, performance, stress, and soak tests for client-server I/O paths, network behavior, and large result-set handling.
Validate query execution correctness and performance when exercised through external clients versus native SQL execution.
Analyze connector-level performance regressions, including result fetching, pagination, batching, serialization/deserialization, compression, and network utilization.
Develop and maintain automated test frameworks (primarily in Java and Python) for connector validation, regression coverage, and performance baselining.
Design and execute benchmarks to evaluate the performance impact of different indexing strategies, including their interaction with query execution, connector-driven access patterns, and I/O behavior across representative workloads.
Debug complex failures involving client drivers, networking, serialization formats, protocol mismatches, and server-side execution paths.
Partner closely with Software Engineers across Connectors, Query Processing, I/O, and Storage teams to isolate root causes and validate fixes.
Review execution plans, logs, metrics, and traces to assess correctness and performance impact.
Act as a quality gate for connector and I/O-related features prior to release, including customer-driven fixes and escalations.