Job DescriptionAs 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.
As a Principal Software Development Engineer in Test, you will be responsible for:
- 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.
Do what you loveTo be successful in this role you will:
- Have 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.
CompensationAkamai is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. For US based candidates only - the base salary for this position ranges from $169,300 - $304,700/year; a candidate's salary is determined by various factors including, but not limited to, relevant work experience, skills, certifications and location. Compensation for candidates outside the US will vary. The compensation package may also include incentive compensation opportunities in the form of annual bonus or incentives, equity awards and an Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP). Akamai provides industry-leading benefits including healthcare, 401K savings plan, company holidays, vacation (in the form of PTO), sick time, family friendly benefits including parental leave and an employee assistance program including a focus on mental and financial wellness; Eligibility requirements apply.
