Quality Assurance Staff Engineer

Role & responsibilities :

Quality Architecture & Test Strategy Leadership :

- Design and architect comprehensive test strategies for WAF security rules, threat detection, and attack mitigation capabilities.

- Define quality standards, testing methodologies, and acceptance criteria for enterprise-grade WAF deployments.

- Create test frameworks and automation infrastructure for functional, security, performance, and integration testing.

- Develop reference test architectures for various deployment scenarios (cloud, on-premise, hybrid, multi-CDN).

- Lead test strategy reviews and provide guidance on test coverage, regression testing, and quality metrics.

- Establish best practices for security testing, including OWASP Top 10 validation, false positive/negative testing, and attack simulation.

Enterprise Customer Quality Support & Escalations :

- Serve as the primary quality escalation point for critical enterprise customer issues and deployment challenges.

- Conduct deep-dive investigations into customer-reported bugs, performance degradations, false positives/negatives, and configuration issues.

- Work directly with customer security, QA, and DevOps teams to validate WAF deployments, reproduce issues, and verify fixes.

- Design and execute customer-specific test scenarios to validate WAF configurations before production deployment.

- Provide technical QA expertise during customer war rooms, helping troubleshoot and validate fixes for security incidents.

- Build strong relationships with enterprise customers, becoming their trusted advisor for quality and testing practices.

Security & Network Testing Expertise :

- Design and execute comprehensive security test cases for OWASP Top 10, zero-day vulnerabilities, and emerging attack vectors.

- Validate WAF detection capabilities against real-world attack patterns, payloads, and evasion techniques.

- Develop test harnesses for complex networking scenarios across Layer 3-7, including TLS/SSL, HTTP/2, WebSockets, gRPC, and HTTP/3.

- Create automated tests for DDoS mitigation, bot detection, API security, and application-layer attack scenarios.

- Validate WAF performance under various load conditions, attack patterns, and traffic profiles.

- Test edge cases involving protocol violations, malformed requests, and RFC compliance.

- Collaborate with security research teams to translate threat intelligence into comprehensive test coverage.

Test Automation & Tooling Development :

- Build and maintain robust test automation frameworks for WAF rule testing, traffic replay, and attack simulation.

- Develop tools for log analysis, metrics collection, and automated validation of security events.

- Create performance testing infrastructure to validate WAF throughput, latency, and resource utilization at scale.

- Implement CI/CD test pipelines for continuous validation of WAF rules and detection capabilities.

- Design test data generation tools for creating realistic traffic patterns, attack payloads, and edge cases.

- Build customer environment simulation frameworks to reproduce production issues in test environments.

Quality Leadership & Process Improvement :

- Mentor QA engineers and developers on testing best practices, security testing, and quality methodologies.

- Drive quality metrics, defect analysis, and root cause investigations for production issues.

- Participate in design reviews to provide testability feedback and identify potential quality risks.

- Champion shift-left testing practices and test-driven development within the engineering team.

- Participate in on-call rotations for critical enterprise customer quality issues.

Preferred candidate profile :

- 8+ years of software quality assurance and test engineering experience, with at least 3 years in security-focused testing roles.

- 3+ years testing WAF, firewalls, CDN, load balancers, reverse proxies, or similar security/networking products.

- Proven track record of handling enterprise customer quality escalations and validating complex deployments.

- Experience designing and implementing test automation frameworks for large-scale distributed systems.

- Strong background in customer-facing QA roles such as quality engineering for enterprise products, technical support, or solutions validation.

Skills

Software Quality Assurance, Testing, Security Testing, Network Testing, Automation Testing, WAF, Test Strategy, Defect/Bug Management Process, Implementation Testing, System Testing