Principal SDET: Performance & Bare-Metal VM Testing

Akamai Career Site; United States; On-site; USD 169,000 - 305,000; Full time

Job summary

Akamai is seeking a Principal Software Development Engineer in Test to lead test strategy for hypervisor behavior and VM performance within the IaaS platform. You will design reproducible, container-based test environments that simulate bare-metal VM conditions and validate data integrity without physical hardware.

You will develop automated performance benchmarks with statistical baselines, participate in CI/CD quality gates, and collaborate with product and SRE to define SLO measurements and

Qualifications

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

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 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

SDET leadership

Performance testing

Hypervisor platforms

KVM/QEMU/libvirt

Linux fundamentals

Cross-architecture debugging

Tools

Linux perf

VTune

eBPF

Bash

Jenkins

SaltStack

Job description

Akamai is seeking a Principal Software Development Engineer in Test to lead test strategy for hypervisor behavior and VM performance within the IaaS platform. You will design reproducible, container-based test environments that simulate bare-metal VM conditions and validate data integrity without physical hardware.

You will develop automated performance benchmarks with statistical baselines, participate in CI/CD quality gates, and collaborate with product and SRE to define SLO measurements and