About the role
e6data Platform is a high-performance, multi-cloud data platform. Our system runs across AWS, Azure, and GCP on Kubernetes, spanning a control plane, a distributed compute/query layer, catalog and metadata services, and multi-tenant workspace provisioning. Testing it well means understanding how it actually works — not just clicking through a UI.
We're looking for a Senior QA Engineer who can do two things exceptionally well: own automation as an engineering discipline, and build deep product knowledge of a complex distributed system. You'll design and grow our test frameworks, and you'll be expected to reason about the platform end to end — from an API call, down through Kubernetes and the database, out to cloud IAM. This is a hands-on senior role: you set quality strategy for features and releases and you write the code that enforces it.
What you'll do
- Own and extend our automation framework. Design reusable, parallel-safe, well-abstracted test suites (API clients, fixtures/context layers, guaranteed setup and teardown) — not just add cases to an existing harness.
- Build real product expertise. Develop a working mental model of the platform: control plane vs. compute plane, workspace/environment lifecycle, catalog and metadata flows, query execution, and multi-tenancy. Use it to find the bugs that matter.
- Design risk-based test strategy. For each feature and release, decide what to cover and what to skip based on blast radius — tenant isolation, access-control boundaries, upgrade and rollback paths, failure modes.
- Debug across layers. Take a symptom (a stuck provisioning request, a 403 that isn't really a 403, a flaky query) and drive it to root cause across services, Kubernetes, the database, and cloud IAM.
- Drive release quality. Own test execution for releases across multiple environments, contribute to runbooks, and help make deployments (blue-green, feature-flagged rollouts) safe and boring.
- Think adversarially. Probe RBAC and multi-tenant boundaries, credential handling, and data-access paths — treat the happy path as table stakes.
- Communicate clearly. File crisp, reproducible bugs; write retros and test documentation that other engineers can act on.
Requirements
What we're looking for
- 4–6 years in QA / SDET roles, with a substantial share of that spent owning automation, not just executing it.
- Strong programming skills in Python (preferred) or a comparable language, with demonstrated framework design experience — you've built or significantly shaped a test framework, not only written tests against one.
- API and backend testing depth — REST, auth flows, data validation, contract/integration testing.
- Solid distributed-systems and cloud fundamentals — you understand how services, state, and failure propagate in a networked, multi-service system.
- Hands-on with at least one cloud (AWS / Azure / GCP) and containers / Kubernetes.
- CI/CD familiarity — you've integrated automated tests into a pipeline and care about fast, reliable feedback.
- Root-cause instinct — you reason from symptom to cause across layers rather than filing a vague bug and moving on.
Nice to have
- Experience testing data platforms, query engines, or big-data systems (e.g., Spark, Trino/Presto, lakehouse architectures, catalogs/metastores).
- Multi-cloud exposure across two or more of AWS / Azure / GCP.
- Security / RBAC / multi-tenancy testing experience.
- Performance, load, or chaos/failure-injection testing.
- Familiarity with Kubernetes operators, Helm, and observability tooling (Grafana, Prometheus/Loki).
What tells us you're operating at a senior level
- You treat automation as design — thinking in abstractions, isolation, and maintainability, not a pile of scripts.
- You've owned a production incident end to end — from escalation through fix to retro and closing the loop.
- You can pick up an unfamiliar system quickly and reason about it, because you understand the underlying patterns rather than memorizing one product.
