Principal Architect - Quality Engineering

DataDirect Networks (DDN) is a global market leader in AI and high-performance data storage innovation. The Principal Architect - Quality Engineering will lead the end-to-end quality strategy for DDN’s Infinia platform, driving quality practices and automation across its distributed architecture.

Responsibilities:

• Define the Infinia-wide quality engineering architecture, driving consistency, testability, and observability across all subsystems (e.g., I/O Path, SPDK Data, Memory, Task Scheduling, Platform Services)
• Architect and evolve end-to-end test frameworks for performance, correctness, data integrity, and security compliance
• Lead the design and implementation of modular and scalable automation frameworks using tools like Robot Framework, Selenium, Pytest, Postman, JMeter, and containerized test environments with Docker, Jenkins, and OpenShift
• Design reusable automation templates and CI pipelines to support rapid iteration and deployment with full validation gates
• Build and maintain comprehensive test plans that validate performance, workload behavior, concurrency, and cross-platform reliability at scale
• Leverage profiling, fuzzing, and failure injection methodologies to ensure system stability under load, including NVMe performance tracing, network saturation, and long-duration testing scenarios
• Partner with architects, developers, DevOps, and customer engineering to integrate quality into early-stage system and feature design
• Lead risk-based test planning, root cause analysis for systemic issues, and verification of security and compliance requirements
• Mentor engineers on test design, automation best practices, and quality standards across platform teams

Requirements:

• 15+ years of experience in software quality engineering, with extensive expertise in test architecture for distributed or cloud-native platforms
• Deep experience with automation development using Python, Bash, and Git-based CI/CD environments
• Proven success in architecting test frameworks across complex infrastructure components or platform services
• Strong understanding of file systems, I/O stack behavior, storage profiling (NVMe, SPDK), and network observability
• ISTQB Certified (or equivalent) with demonstrated leadership in quality process transformation and automation maturity
• Hands-on experience validating large-scale data platforms, file systems, or scheduling engines
• Familiarity with observability stacks (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus) and system profiling tools
• Experience with compliance testing (e.g., Section 508, HIPAA, PCI), and security feature validation (SAML, access control, backup/restore)
• Contributions to open-source testing frameworks or community-recognized QA initiatives