Senior Principal, Solution Test & Automation Engineer

Description

This is a hybrid role: you will be in an HPE office on average 2 days per week.

The company is an edge-to-cloud company that helps customers connect, protect, analyze and act on their data and applications, from edge to cloud.

This is a Senior Principal Solution Test & Automation Engineer role in Customer Engagement, within HPE Networking. It is a highly technical individual contributor position that leads quality engineering for large-scale networking and distributed software solutions.

The role blends deep software testing, system-level engineering, customer engagement and technical leadership. You will be the go-to authority for hard quality engineering problems and will shape product quality, scalability, observability and reliability across the full product lifecycle.

You will work with engineering, architecture, product management, sales engineering, services, support and customers to validate complex networking solutions, build scalable quality practices, and deliver lasting gains in productivity and product quality. Beyond hands-on work, you will lead across functions, mentor engineers and help set the direction for solution validation and automation.

Success here means high technical impact on major products and programs, recognized expertise, leadership across functions, lasting test engineering improvements, mentoring of technical staff, and innovation that improves customer outcomes and business goals.

Responsibilities

• Solution validation and customer engagement: Learn customer deployments, business needs, architectures and large-scale operations, then build complete validation strategies.
• Lead validation for strategic customer solutions and complex networking deployments.
• Work with customers, field engineers, solution architects, sales engineers and services teams to validate real networking solutions and operational readiness.
• Take part in and shape design workshops, architecture reviews and strategy discussions to improve reliability, scalability, observability and serviceability.
• Turn customer requirements into repeatable, solution-focused validation frameworks.
• Present technical findings, risk assessments, quality recommendations and executive updates to customers and internal stakeholders.
• Drive cross-functional work that improves customer outcomes and product quality.
• Automation and quality engineering: Define and drive automation strategy across products, programs and engineering teams.
• Design, build and evolve scalable automation frameworks for functional, integration, system, resiliency, scale, performance and solution validation.
• Set engineering best practices and standards for continuous validation through CI/CD pipelines.
• Lead innovation in automation infrastructure, tooling and AI-assisted engineering.
• Drive company-wide adoption of quality engineering methods that cut time-to-market and raise engineering productivity.
• Find ways to simplify validation workflows and lower operating costs through automation.
• System-level testing and debugging: Lead validation of distributed, multi-component software and networking platforms at scale.
• Run and automate regression, longevity, fault-injection, recovery, scalability, interoperability and performance tests.
• Use logs, metrics, traces, telemetry, observability platforms and diagnostic frameworks to troubleshoot complex failures.
• Lead root-cause investigations that span teams and technology areas.
• Tell product defects apart from infrastructure, automation and environment issues.
• Shape architecture and design decisions to improve testability, diagnosability and operational excellence.
• Technical leadership: Lead technical direction for strategic initiatives, major releases and architecture programs.
• Act as a recognized authority on solution validation, automation and quality engineering.
• Lead and connect engineering teams across functions around shared quality goals.
• Build quality-first practices throughout the development lifecycle.
• Mentor engineers through guidance, reviews, coaching and knowledge sharing.
• Drive technical innovation through patents, white papers, standards work, publications and architecture proposals.
• Build long-term capabilities that create recurring business value and customer impact.

Requirements

• Expert programming skill in Python, Go or C++, with deep proficiency in at least one.
• Extensive experience designing and building automation platforms, frameworks and quality engineering ecosystems.
• Experience putting large-scale automated testing into CI/CD environments.
• A proven record of leading transformational automation initiatives.
• Strong understanding of Linux/UNIX, networking, processes, memory management and system internals.
• Extensive experience validating distributed and multi-component systems.
• Deep hands-on skill configuring and validating multi-vendor networks.
• 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.
• Experience with multi-feature, longevity, resiliency, interoperability, scale and performance testing.
• Experience validating fault injection and recovery.
• Experience with root-cause analysis and complex defect investigation.
• Advanced troubleshooting across multiple software and infrastructure layers.
• A record of leading significant technical initiatives with measurable business impact.
• A proven ability to shape engineering decisions, architecture and strategic direction.
• Experience mentoring engineers and leading cross-functional technical initiatives.
• Preferred: advanced networking knowledge of Layer 2, Layer 3, TCP/IP, routing, MPLS, EVPN and data center technologies.
• Preferred: experience with network operating systems, cloud infrastructure, observability platforms and distributed architectures.
• Preferred: working knowledge of JUNOS.
• Preferred: industry certifications such as JNCIE, CCIE or equivalent.
• Preferred: experience using AI-assisted engineering tools for automation, test generation, diagnostics, failure analysis and productivity gains.
• Preferred: a track record of innovation through patents, publications, standards contributions or architecture leadership.

Conditions

Hybrid work: on average 2 days per week in an HPE office.

Base salary in the United States: USD 187,000 to 377,500 a year in California. Actual offers may differ based on location, experience, education, training and skill level.

Variable incentives may also be offered on top of base salary.

Job level TCP06, Engineering function, based in the United States.

HPE is an equal opportunity employer and makes decisions based on qualifications, merit and business need.

HPE will follow all laws on the use of arrest and conviction records in hiring.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, financial and emotional wellbeing benefits for team members and their families.
• Career development programs, including paths to become a subject-matter expert or move into another division.
• Flexibility to manage work and personal needs.