Senior Staff SDET

Palo Alto Networks • Office - USA - CA - Headquarters, CA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

We're looking for a Senior Staff Engineer who is passionate about building high-impact internal tools and test infrastructure for complex distributed systems. This isn't a traditional QA role—you'll be a hands-on technical leader building automation frameworks and internal platforms that enable product teams to test faster, better, and more reliably. Our product emulates complex, real-world customer environments across a wide range of operating systems, networks, and configurations. You will play a critical role in ensuring quality by designing and building infrastructure, emulating enterprise environments, and developing engineering-focused tools that streamline testing across cloud-native microservices.

Requirements

• 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.
• Ability to write clean, maintainable, well-documented code following engineering best practices.

Nice To Haves

• Experience testing cybersecurity products or enterprise security platforms.
• Experience with SaaS products and large-scale cloud-native architectures.
• Experience with PKI, certificate authorities, certificate lifecycle management, machine identity, or identity management systems.
• Experience working with enterprise IT infrastructure, including load balancers, web servers, certificate authorities, identity management systems, and related technologies.

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.
• Advocate for continuous testing and collaborate with development teams to promote quality engineering best practices throughout the software development lifecycle.
• 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.

Benefits

• The compensation offered for this position will depend on qualifications, experience, and work location. For candidates who receive an offer at the posted level, the starting base salary (for non-sales roles) or base salary + commission target (for sales/com-missioned roles) is expected to be the annual range listed below. The offered compensation may also include restricted stock units and a bonus. A description of our employee benefits may be found here.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed