Principal Software Quality Engineer

Jobgether; United States; On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Jobgether, on behalf of a partner company, is seeking a Principal Software Quality Engineer in the United States. This senior IC role defines and drives quality strategy for a distributed database platform, focusing on reliability, scalability, and resilience.

You will lead testing frameworks, design comprehensive strategies, and collaborate across quality, client, and server engineering teams. Experience with AI-assisted testing and complex debugging is valued.

Qualifications

• Senior technical individual-contributor role defining and driving quality strategy for a distributed database platform.
• Experience integrating AI agents into testing workflows and frameworks.
• Ability to mentor senior engineers and influence quality practices across the organization.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the overall quality strategy for the distributed database platform, including test architecture and risk-based prioritization.
• Drive quality across database server components, client SDKs, operators, backup tooling, and management interfaces.
• Design comprehensive testing strategies for replication, rebalancing, partitioning, sharding, consistency models, and transactions.
• Establish reliable test coverage for critical database operations and ensure quality requirements are addressed early in development lifecycle.
• Validate cluster correctness under production-like failure conditions, including node crashes and network partitions.
• Design and execute fault-injection scenarios involving process crashes and state manipulation with debugging tools.

Skills

Distributed systems

Testing automation

Systems debugging

Quality strategy

Tools

GDB

Job description

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Principal Software Quality Engineer based in the United States.
In this senior technical individual-contributor role, you will define and drive quality strategy for a sophisticated distributed database platform, ensuring reliability, scalability, and resilience across complex systems. You will combine deep distributed systems expertise with advanced software testing, automation, and systems-level debugging. Working across quality engineering, client engineering, and server engineering teams, you will identify critical failure scenarios and establish robust testing frameworks. You will also lead the integration of AI agents into testing workflows, enabling intelligent test generation, automated failure analysis, and improved engineering efficiency. This position offers the opportunity to influence technical standards, mentor senior engineers, and shape quality practices across the organization. It is ideal for an experienced engineer who enjoys hands‑on technical challenges, complex debugging, and building scalable quality infrastructure.

Accountabilities

• Define and own the overall quality strategy for the distributed database platform, including test architecture, coverage models, release criteria, and risk-based prioritization.
• Drive quality across database server components, client SDKs, operators, backup tooling, and management interfaces.
• Design comprehensive testing strategies for replication, rebalancing, partitioning, sharding, consistency models, transactions, isolation, secondary indexes, query planning, compaction, backup and restore, snapshots, and cross-datacenter replication.
• Establish reliable test coverage for critical database operations and ensure quality and testability requirements are incorporated early in the software development lifecycle.
• Validate cluster correctness under production‑like failure conditions, including node crashes, network partitions, clock skew, disk failures, rolling upgrades, mixed‑version deployments, and long‑running soak tests.
• Design and execute fault‑injection scenarios involving process crashes, GDB‑driven state manipulation, packet