Technical Lead - QA

Job Title: Technical Lead - QA (SDET) – Kubernetes Platform

We cannot consider s, visa holders, or candidates requiring sponsorship now or in the future.

About the Company

Our client is a well-funded, fast-growing cloud infrastructure company. Its Kubernetes-native platform helps enterprise and federal customers manage complex multi-cloud, data center, edge, and air-gapped environments at scale. They are expanding their core quality engineering team in San Jose, CA.

About the Role

This is a hands-on individual contributor role, not a people-management position. You will own test strategy, build automation frameworks from the ground up, and work directly with platform engineers on a technically demanding Kubernetes stack.

Responsibilities

• Design and build automated test frameworks for a Kubernetes-native platform across cloud, data center, edge, and air-gapped deployments
• Write and maintain end-to-end, integration, and performance tests against Kubernetes clusters, custom operators, CRDs, and multi-cluster environments
• Validate AI inference workloads, including GPU-based model serving, latency SLAs, and deployment readiness gates
• Own pre-release quality gates and partner with DevOps and platform engineering on CI/CD pipelines
• Build observability into test infrastructure using Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry
• Drive non-functional testing: load, chaos, scalability, and compatibility

Required Qualifications

• ship (mandatory)
• 12+ years in software quality engineering or SDET roles
• Deep hands-on Kubernetes expertise: cluster management, operators, CRDs, multi-cluster, and networking (CNI, service mesh, ingress)
• Production experience with Docker and Kubernetes on AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Azure
• Strong test automation engineering: framework design, CI/CD integration, release ownership
• Proficiency in Python; Go experience or willingness to learn it (the team uses Godog for BDD)
• Strong Linux skills and comfort with low-level debugging
• Experience with production observability tooling

Nice to Have

• CKA, CKAD, or CKS certification
• Experience with AI inference serving (vLLM, Triton, KServe) or LLM/model validation
• Background at a Kubernetes-native infrastructure vendor (VMware, Red Hat, Cisco, Arista, Rancher, or similar)
• TestRail, Testmo, or Zephyr experience
• Performance, load, and chaos testing background

Job Details

• Location: San Jose, CA, on-site 3 days per week (hybrid)
• Employment Type: Full-time, direct hire (W-2)
• Compensation: $180,000 – $200,000 base salary plus equity
• Start Date: Immediate joiners preferred
No sponsorship. No third-party or C2C.