Senior Principal, Solution Test & Automation Engineer

Overview

Senior Principal Solution Test & Automation Engineer leading quality engineering for large-scale networking and distributed software solutions as a hands-on individual contributor, with cross-functional technical leadership.

What you'll do

• Understand customer deployments, business requirements, architectures, and large-scale operational environments to develop comprehensive validation strategies.
• Lead validation efforts for strategic customer solutions and complex networking deployments.
• Collaborate with customers, field engineers, solution architects, sales engineers, and services teams to validate real-world networking solutions and operational readiness.
• Participate in and influence technical design workshops, architecture reviews, and strategic planning discussions to improve reliability, scalability, observability, and serviceability.
• Translate customer requirements into repeatable, solution-focused validation frameworks.
• Present technical findings, risk assessments, quality recommendations, and executive-level updates to customers and internal stakeholders.
• Drive cross-functional initiatives that improve customer outcomes and product quality.
• Define and drive automation strategy across products, programs, and engineering teams.
• Architect, develop, and evolve scalable automation frameworks supporting functional, integration, system, resiliency, scale, performance, and solution validation.
• Establish engineering best practices and standards for continuous validation through CI/CD pipelines.
• Lead innovation in automation infrastructure, tooling, and AI-assisted engineering practices.
• Drive organization-wide adoption of quality engineering methodologies that improve time-to-market and engineering productivity.
• Identify opportunities to simplify validation workflows and reduce operational costs through automation.
• Lead validation of distributed, multi-component software and networking platforms at scale.
• Execute and automate regression, longevity, fault-injection, recovery, scalability, interoperability, and performance testing.
• Utilize logs, metrics, traces, telemetry, observability platforms, and diagnostic frameworks to troubleshoot complex failures.
• Lead root-cause investigations spanning multiple teams and technology domains.
• Differentiate product defects from infrastructure, automation, and environmental issues.
• Influence architecture and design decisions to improve product testability, diagnosability, and operational excellence.
• Provide technical leadership for strategic initiatives, major releases, and architectural programs.
• Serve as a recognized authority for solution validation, automation, and quality engineering.
• Lead and connect engineering teams across functions to align around common quality objectives.
• Drive quality-first engineering practices throughout the development lifecycle.
• Mentor engineers through technical guidance, reviews, coaching, and knowledge sharing.
• Contribute to technical innovation through patents, white papers, standards participation, publications, and architectural proposals.
• Build long-term technical capabilities that create recurring business value and customer impact.

What you'll need

• Expert-level programming expertise in Python, Go, or C++, with deep proficiency in at least one language.
• Extensive experience designing and building automation platforms, frameworks, and quality engineering ecosystems.
• Experience integrating large-scale automated testing into CI/CD environments.
• Proven history of driving transformational automation initiatives.
• Strong understanding of Linux/UNIX operating systems, networking, processes, memory management, and system internals.
• Extensive experience validating distributed and multi-component systems.
• Deep hands-on expertise configuring and validating multi-vendor networking environments.
• Experience supporting service provider, enterprise, and cloud networking deployments.
• Strong knowledge of performance testing and traffic-generation platforms such as Ixia and Spirent.
• Deep expertise in system-level and end-to-end validation.
• Multi-feature, longevity, resiliency, interoperability, scale, and performance testing.
• Fault injection and recovery validation.
• Root-cause analysis and complex defect investigation.
• Advanced troubleshooting across multiple software and infrastructure layers.
• Demonstrated history of leading significant technical initiatives with measurable business impact.
• Proven ability to influence engineering decisions, architecture, and strategic direction.
• Experience mentoring engineers and leading cross-functional technical initiatives.

Nice to have

• Advanced networking expertise in Layer 2, Layer 3, TCP/IP, Routing, MPLS, EVPN, and data center technologies.
• Experience with network operating systems, cloud infrastructure, observability platforms, and distributed architectures.
• Working knowledge of JUNOS.
• Industry certifications such as JNCIE, CCIE, or equivalent.
• Experience leveraging AI-assisted engineering tools for automation development, test generation, diagnostics, failure analysis, and productivity improvements.
• Track record of innovation resulting in patents, publications, standards contributions, or architectural leadership.

Details

• Hybrid role: on average 2 days per week from an HPE office.
• Location: Sunnyvale, California, United States of America.
• Employment is in the Engineering function, job level TCP_06, Individual Contributor role.
• Annual base salary range USD 187,000 - 377,500 in California; variable incentives may also be offered.