Senior Principal Solution Test & Automation Engineer - Customer Engagement

Work arrangement

• The role is hybrid and requires an average of two days per week in an HPE office.

Role overview

Solution validation and customer engagement

• Develop validation strategies based on customer deployments, business requirements, architectures, and large-scale operational environments.
• Lead validation for strategic customer solutions and complex networking deployments.
• Collaborate with customers and internal field, architecture, sales engineering, and services teams to validate real-world solutions and operational readiness.
• Influence technical design workshops, architecture reviews, and strategic planning to improve reliability, scalability, observability, and serviceability.
• Create repeatable solution-focused validation frameworks and present technical findings, risk assessments, and recommendations.

Automation and quality engineering

• Define automation strategy and evolve scalable frameworks for functional, integration, system, resiliency, scale, performance, and solution validation.
• Establish best practices for continuous validation through CI/CD and drive innovation in automation infrastructure, tooling, and AI-assisted engineering.
• Improve adoption of quality engineering methods, simplify validation workflows, and reduce operational costs through automation.

Testing and technical leadership

• Lead system-level validation of distributed, multi-component software and networking platforms at scale, including regression, longevity, fault-injection, recovery, scalability, interoperability, and performance tests.
• Use logs, metrics, traces, telemetry, observability platforms, and diagnostic frameworks to troubleshoot failures and lead root-cause investigations.
• Influence architecture and design for improved testability, diagnosability, and operational excellence.
• Lead strategic initiatives, releases, and architectural programs; mentor engineers and promote quality-first engineering.
• Contribute to patents, white papers, standards, publications, and architectural proposals.

Basic qualifications

• Expert-level programming in Python, Go, or C++, with deep proficiency in at least one language.
• Extensive experience building automation platforms, frameworks, and quality engineering ecosystems and integrating automated testing into CI/CD.
• Strong understanding of Linux/UNIX, networking, system internals, and distributed systems validation.
• Hands-on experience configuring multi-vendor networking environments and supporting service provider, enterprise, and cloud networking deployments.
• Strong performance-testing knowledge, including traffic-generation platforms such as Ixia and Spirent.
• Deep system-level and end-to-end testing expertise, including resiliency, interoperability, scale, performance, fault injection, recovery, and complex defect analysis.
• Demonstrated technical initiative leadership and ability to influence engineering decisions, architecture, and strategy.
• Experience mentoring engineers and leading cross-functional technical initiatives.

Preferred qualifications

• Advanced knowledge of 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.
• JNCIE, CCIE, or equivalent certifications; experience with AI-assisted engineering tools.
• Innovation record through patents, publications, standards contributions, or architectural leadership.

Compensation

• The listed annual base salary range in California is USD 183,000–370,500; variable incentives may also be offered.