Principal Software Development Engineer in Test Lead

Akamai Technologies; United States; Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Akamai Technologies, Inc. is seeking a Principal SDET Lead on the Meerkat team to guide automated testing, performance validation, and scalable benchmarking for our cloud infrastructure.

You will mentor engineers, define the technical vision, and develop frameworks that ensure high quality across diverse platforms, while driving CI/CD improvements and performance targets for a global compute fleet.

Qualifications

• Experience building and maintaining automated test frameworks.
• Strong knowledge of performance benchmarking and telemetry analysis.
• Proficiency in Python with exposure to Go and shell scripting.

Responsibilities

• Design and architect scalable, distributed testing frameworks for cloud platforms.
• Mentor engineers; define technical vision, roadmap, and best practices.
• Develop and maintain automated testing frameworks for quality and reliability across platforms.
• Define performance criteria, SLAs, and latency targets for global deployments.
• Enhance CI/CD pipelines to support automated regression and performance testing.
• Collaborate with developers, SRE, and datacenter operations to improve performance and resolve bottlenecks.

Skills

Python

Go

Linux/Bash scripting

CI/CD

Git workflows

Performance engineering

Distributed testing

Tools

Jenkins

Git

Job description

Are you passionate about Performance Engineering & Automation at Scale?

Are you passionate about Automation Developing?

Join our Compute Team!

Akamai's Compute Team focuses on simplifying, scaling, and making cloud computing globally accessible and affordable while fostering innovation. The Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) II handles automated testing, framework maintenance, and quality assurance. Responsibilities include maintaining software platforms and managing hypervisor upgrades within the growing infrastructure.

Partner with the best

This position delivers architectural guidance and technical expertise for performance engineering within Akamai Compute, emphasizing Meerkat's automation framework. Responsibilities include resolving performance bottlenecks, designing distributed benchmarking systems, and establishing hardware validation standards for advanced cloud infrastructure.

As a Principal SDET Lead on the Meerkat team, your responsibilities will include:

• Designing and architecting scalable, distributed testing frameworks and automated benchmarking tools for advanced cloud computing platforms.
• Guiding and mentoring a team of engineers while defining technical vision, roadmap, and best practices for performance engineering and automated validation.
• Designing, developing, and maintaining automated testing frameworks to ensure software quality and reliability across various platforms.
• Defining and enforcing performance criteria, SLAs, and latency targets across global compute fleet deployments to ensure operational efficiency.
• Designing, scaling, and optimizing CI/CD pipelines to support continuous integration, automated regression, and performance testing across hardware and software infrastructure.
• Collaborating with developers, SRE, datacenter operations, and the Meerkat team to enhance performance, refine testing, resolve bottlenecks, and achieve goals.

Do what you love

To be successful in this role you will:

• Demonstrate explicit knowledge and understanding of high level hardware and software performance objectives.
• Leverage data analysis techniques to process complex performance telemetry, build predictive capacity models, and publish actionable technical insights.
• Analyze performance data within data science and transform it into actionable documents for effective use by the Compute team.
• Demonstrate expertise in Python and experience with Go, Linux/Bash scripting for backend automation, system tools, and test suites.
• Implement CI/CD and DevOps integration, utilizing Jenkins for pipeline scaling and advanced Git workflows expertise.
• Demonstrate extensive practical expertise with Linux-based operating systems. Experience using AI to accelerate development tasks.

About us

At Akamai, we make life better for billions of people, trillions of times a day.
Whether you're streaming live events, scrolling social media, watching your favorite series, or managing your savings, we're the engine behind the scenes. We provide the world's most distributed platform from Cloud to Edge to help the giants of the digital world work faster and stay more secure, making the internet a better experience for everyone.

Our focus is simple:

Cloud and Edge: Running apps closer to users for instant performance.
Security: Neutralizing threats before they ever reach your data.
Content Delivery: Scaling the world's biggest moments without a glitch.
AI: Enabling our customers to build, secure, and scale AI apps on the world's most distributed cloud platform.
At Akamai, we don't just support the internet; we power and protect it, because behind every great digital experience is a massive hidden challenge. And we're the ones who solve it. When millions of people hit play or pay, Akamai ensures it just works.

Benefits at Akamai: We support your health, well-being, finances, and life beyond work. See our benefits.

FlexBase adapts to your job's needs

Akamai's FlexBase program is yet another way we show our commitment to providing employees with an exceptional workplace experience. It's not about telling employees where to work; it's about supporting employees to do their best work.
We trust our incredible employees to work in ways that suit them best: at home, in an office, or a combination of both.

Connect with us on social and see what life at Akamai is like!