Senior SDET

Madrona Venture Labs; Vancouver; Hybrid; CAD 130,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, vision, and dental benefits

Job summary

Tigera is hiring a Senior SDET to own quality for Calico’s converged networking, building Go automation, and environment harnesses that support hybrid Kubernetes and VM topologies. You will integrate tests into CI, drive test strategy, and ensure releases are thoroughly validated before shipping.

You will work closely with developers, PM, and customer success to push for testability early in design and to surface risk that affects release readiness. Vancouver-based with a hybrid work model.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in quality/test engineering, DevOps, or SRE, with networking/ infra experience.
• Hands-on Kubernetes operations knowledge across distributions.
• VM estate familiarity: VMware/vSphere, KVM/libvirt, or Hyper-V; VM networking basics.

Responsibilities

• Build automation: integration and system-level Go tests, tooling, and environment harnesses for hybrid Kubernetes and VM topologies.
• Wire test suites into CI to exercise builds against real migration scenarios end-to-end.

Skills

Quality engineering

Kubernetes ops

Go programming

CI/CD pipelines

Networking basics

Linux fundamentals

Tools

Terraform

VMware vSphere

KVM/libvirt

bpftool

Prometheus

Job description

Tigera provides Calico, a unified network security and observability platform to prevent, detect and mitigate security breaches in Kubernetes clusters. Tigera’s open-source offering, Calico Open Source, is the most widely adopted container networking and security solution.

Powering more than 100M containers across 8M+ nodes in 166 countries, Calico software is supported across all major cloud providers and Kubernetes distributions, and is used by leading companies including Discover, Chipotle, NBCUniversal, HanseMerkur, Box, Siemens Healthineers, Playtech, Royal Bank of Canada, and Bell Canada.

As our team grows, we are looking for colleagues who not only share our passion for this work and growing our company, but who will also strengthen our company values and help ensure that Tigera remains a great place to work. At our core, our focus is on our customers, who are the heroes of our story; on aiming high and staying nimble in how we get there; on continuous learning to drive our success; and on respecting, collaborating, and supporting each other on a daily basis.

If you are looking to help make a substantial impact, and our values and products align with your vision of your career growth, we want to hear from you!

About Your Role

Tigera is hiring a Senior SDET to own quality for Calico’s converged networking, the capability that lets enterprises run virtual machines and containers side by side on Kubernetes. Enterprises are migrating large VM estates onto Kubernetes at speed, and the networking carrying those workloads sits squarely on the critical path: a half-migrated cluster that silently drops traffic isn’t a bug someone files next sprint, it’s an outage. You will own the test strategy for that surface end to end, deciding what has to be proved before a release ships, building the Go automation and the environment harnesses that stand up hybrid Kubernetes and VM topologies on demand, and wiring it into CI so every build is exercised against real migration scenarios. This is a hands-on role for someone who treats quality as engineering, not gatekeeping: you’ll write the tests, build the tooling the team depends on, go hunting in the half-migrated and partially-failed states nobody specified, and be the person who can say with evidence whether a release is ready.

We are looking for an engineer who is as comfortable root-causing a packet drop across a cluster as writing the harness that reproduces it, and who turns every field escape into permanent coverage rather than a one-off fix.

For this position, we are looking to hire in Vancouver (Hybrid).

Vancouver Salary Range: CAD $130,000 to CAD $150,000

You Will:

• Build the automation: integration and system-level suites in Go (unit tests stay with the developers who own the code), plus the tooling and environment harnesses that stand up hybrid Kubernetes and VM topologies on demand and tear them down cleanly.
• Wire it into CI: so every build is exercised against real migration scenarios end to end - provision, deploy, run, report. And keep the signal trustworthy by chasing flakes down instead of rerunning around them.
• Work shoulder to shoulder with developers, PM, and customer success: Push for testability while designs are still open, surface risk early enough that someone can act on it, and give a clear read on release readiness rather than a pass/fail count.
• Break things on purpose: Explore past the written plan, go after the half-migrated and partially-failed states nobody specified, and find the edge cases the developers missed.Turn field escapes into permanent coverage: reproduce the customer's issue, land the regression test, and make sure that class of bug can't come back.
• Turn field escapes into permanent coverage: Reproduce the customer's issue, land the regression test, and make sure that class of bug can't come back

You Have

• 5+ years in quality/test engineering, DevOps, or SRE, with at least 1 of those spent testing networking, infrastructure, or distributed systems (not just application layer). Owning test strategy for a product area, not executing plans written by others.
• Hands on Kubernetes operations knowledge on at least one distribution (kubeadm/upstream, OpenShift, Rancher/RKE, EKS/GKE/AKS): that may include cluster bootstrapping, workload deployment, and independently root causing failures across pods, services, CNI, DNS, RBAC, and ingress.
• Working knowledge of a VM estate: VMware vSphere/ESXi, KVM/libvirt, or Hyper‑V. VM networking (bridges, VLANs, trunking, SR‑IOV), and how VM resident applications discover and reach each other.
• Comfortable in Linux and solid on networking fundamentals.
• Proficiency in a compiled or scripting language for writing production-quality test code and tooling. Go is the language of our choice and is strongly preferred. However Python or Java with willingness to work primarily in Go is acceptable.
  • Designing, implementing, and maintaining end-to-end CI pipelines that provision infrastructure, deploy the product, run suites, and publish results. Plus infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or equivalent) for reproducible, disposable test environments

Nice-to-Have

• Calico or Calico Enterprise, or depth in another CNI; understanding of Kubernetes NetworkPolicy semantics and of extending policy to non-cluster workloads (host endpoints, VM/bare-metal endpoints).
• Linux systems and networking depth: iptables/nftables, ip route/ip rule, network namespaces, tcpdump/conntrack, routing and IPAM concepts. Can diagnose a packet drop end to end without escalating.
• KubeVirt or OpenShift Virtualization: VM workload scheduling on Kubernetes and their networking behaviour, including live migration.
• eBPF familiarity - reading and tracing problems, bpftool, XDP concepts.
• Understanding of IPv6 and dual-stack, overlays and encryption modes.
• Service mesh interaction with CNI and policy (eg. Istio Ambient mesh).
• Scale, soak, and failure-injection testing; test observability and systematic flake triage using Prometheus/Grafana, log aggregation.

With offices in San Francisco, San Jose, Vancouver (Canada), Cork (Ireland), and London (England), we have a thriving team of diverse individuals from all over the world. We believe in a collaborative, flexible work environment based on respect for, and commitment from, every employee. We also offer a competitive compensation package along with full health, vision, and dental benefits. These benefits, coupled with an amazing team of individuals who believe in our mission and value openness, collaboration, and teamwork, make Tigera an awesome place to work.