Principal SDET: Performance & Bare-Metal VM Testing

Akamai Career Site; Canada; Hybrid; CAD 140,000 - 253,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

FlexBase program

Job summary

Akamai is seeking a Principal Software Development Engineer in Test to own VM/fleet test strategy, performance quality gates, and hypervisor behavior validation across the IaaS platform.

You will define test strategies, design reproducible environments using containers, and develop automated benchmarks to ensure deployment safety and long-term reliability. Strong Linux and performance-analysis skills are essential.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of testing experience, including performance testing and hypervisor platforms.
• Experience with KVM/QEMU/libvirt internals, VM-exits, and NUMA/cache effects on performance.
• Experience debugging across architectures (x86, ARM) on bare metal and emulated environments.
• Strong Linux fundamentals: scheduler, memory management, I/O subsystems, storage and block devices.
• Proficiency with Linux perf, VTune, eBPF, Bash, Jenkins, and SaltStack.
• Ability to design reproducible test environments using containers.

Responsibilities

• Define and own test strategy for hypervisor behavior, VM performance, and fleet-level quality gates; mentor SDETs on statistical rigor and systems-level testing.
• Design reproducible test environments that emulate bare-metal VM conditions using containers, validating data integrity without physical hardware.
• Develop automated performance benchmarks with statistical baselines, change-point detection, and regression gating for CI/CD pipelines.
• Collaborate with product and SRE to define SLO measurement and validate deployment safety and rollback strategies.
• Write test harnesses and performance analysis pipelines in Go, Python, and Perl.

Skills

Statistical thinking

Linux fundamentals

Jenkins

Bash

Test design

Tools

KVM/QEMU/libvirt internals

VM-exits

NUMA/cache effects

Linux perf

VTune

eBPF

SaltStack

Job description

Akamai is seeking a Principal Software Development Engineer in Test to own VM/fleet test strategy, performance quality gates, and hypervisor behavior validation across the IaaS platform.

You will define test strategies, design reproducible environments using containers, and develop automated benchmarks to ensure deployment safety and long-term reliability. Strong Linux and performance-analysis skills are essential.