# Staff Engineer

**Company:** [Illumio](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/illumio)
**Location:** Sunnyvale, CA
**Role:** QA Engineering
**Salary:** $194k – $233k/yr
**Experience:** 9+ years
**Skills:** Python, Go, JavaScript, Cypress, Playwright, Pytest, AWS, Azure, GCP, CI/CD, Kubernetes, REST APIs, Docker, Terraform, Kafka
**Posted:** 2026-08-18

> The Staff Engineer will own automated testing, performance validation, and quality engineering for a multi-cloud micro-segmentation platform. The role requires extensive automation experience with distributed SaaS systems, cloud networking, CI/CD, and resilient large-scale testing.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities

### Product Quality & Automation
- Design and execute functional, integration, and end-to-end test strategies for CloudSecure features.
- Build and maintain scalable API, UI, and end-to-end automation frameworks.
- Validate cloud security workflows, including resource discovery, policy computation, flow ingestion, visualization, and compliance across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
- Partner with engineering and product teams to define acceptance criteria, improve testability, and drive shift-left quality practices.
- Own defect triage, root cause analysis, and release readiness for assigned feature areas.

### Quality Engineering & Infrastructure
- Design and execute large-scale performance and scalability tests simulating enterprise customer environments with thousands of workloads, hundreds of VPCs/VNETs, millions of flow records, and large policy and inventory datasets.
- Build automated performance benchmarks and regression suites to detect latency, throughput, and resource utilization regressions.
- Validate system behavior under stress, peak load, and long-running endurance scenarios.
- Design and execute chaos engineering experiments involving database failovers, Kafka failures and lag, network partitions, cloud API throttling, pod failures, and out-of-memory scenarios.
- Validate graceful degradation, fault tolerance, recovery, and high availability across distributed services.
- Own quality gates within CI/CD and continuously improve automation reliability, execution time, and release confidence.
- Drive cross-module integration testing across User Console, CloudSecure services, Policy Compute Engine, and supporting platform services.
- Develop tooling that enables developers to self-serve test environments, test data, and automation execution.

## Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science or an equivalent degree; a master’s degree is a plus.
- 9+ years building automation for SaaS or cloud-native distributed systems.
- Strong programming skills in Python, Go, JavaScript, or similar languages.
- Hands-on experience with automation frameworks such as Cypress, Playwright, Pytest, or equivalent.
- Experience designing automation for APIs, UIs, and distributed microservices.
- Hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP, including networking and security constructs such as VPCs, VNets, security groups, firewalls, and IAM.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar tools.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, REST APIs, Kubernetes, and cloud-native architectures.
- Ability to debug application code and work closely with developers to identify root causes.

## Nice to Have
- Experience with performance and load testing tools such as k6, Locust, JMeter, or Gatling.
- Experience profiling application performance and identifying bottlenecks across distributed systems.
- Familiarity with observability platforms such as Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, or OpenTelemetry.
- Experience with chaos engineering tools such as Litmus, Gremlin, or Chaos Monkey.
- Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and Terraform.
- Understanding of network security, segmentation, firewall policies, and cloud networking.
- Experience testing enterprise-scale, multi-tenant SaaS platforms.

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