Principal SDET: Performance & Bare-Metal VM Systems

Akamai Technologies, Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 99,000 - 179,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

FlexBase program

Work from home options

Job summary

Akamai is seeking a Principal Software Development Engineer in Test to own VM/fleet test strategy, performance quality gates, and hypervisor validation across the IaaS platform. You will design reproducible test environments that emulate bare-metal VM conditions using containers, validate data integrity, and develop automated benchmarks with baselines and change-point detection.

Collaborate with product and SRE to define SLO measurements, deployment safety, and rollback strategies; write test

Qualifications

• 12 years in testing, including performance testing, hypervisor platforms, and systems engineering.
• Experience in KVM/QEMU/libvirt internals and VM-exits.
• Experience debugging across architectures (x86, ARM) on bare metal and emulated environments.
• Strong Linux fundamentals: scheduler, memory management, I/O subsystems, storage architectures.
• Statistical thinking: experimental design, baseline analysis, variance control.
• Proficiency in Linux perf, VTune, eBPF, Bash, Jenkins, and SaltStack.

Responsibilities

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

Skills

Performance testing

Hypervisor platforms

KVM/QEMU/libvirt

VM internals

NUMA/cache effects

x86

ARM

Linux fundamentals

Linux perf

Bash

Jenkins

SaltStack

Go

Python

Perl

Tools

VTune

eBPF

Job description

Akamai is seeking a Principal Software Development Engineer in Test to own VM/fleet test strategy, performance quality gates, and hypervisor validation across the IaaS platform. You will design reproducible test environments that emulate bare-metal VM conditions using containers, validate data integrity, and develop automated benchmarks with baselines and change-point detection.

Collaborate with product and SRE to define SLO measurements, deployment safety, and rollback strategies; write test