Quality Engineer, Secure Firewall End-to-End Testing

Cisco Systems, Inc; Maryland; On-site; USD 138,000 - 198,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401(k) with Cisco match

Paid parental leave

Disability coverage

Basic life insurance

Paid time away

Volunteer days

Job summary

Cisco Systems, Inc. is seeking a Software Quality Engineer to own test areas for Secure Firewall solutions across physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

You will lead risk-based test planning and execution, collaborating with development, platform, and release teams to ensure robust product quality. The role emphasizes Python automation, Linux expertise, and experience with AI-assisted testing, with opportunities to design and maintain complex test environments and regression suites.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree + 5 years of experience in software quality engineering, system testing, network engineering, or a related discipline.
• Experience designing test scenarios, selecting appropriate methodologies, and configuring the required test environments.
• Experience using Python or a comparable scripting language for test automation and tooling.
• Experience with Linux or Unix administration and troubleshooting skills.
• Experience leveraging generative AI assistants across the software development lifecycle to accelerate coding, automate testing, and streamline work item management.

Responsibilities

• Develop and execute risk-based test plans for Cisco Secure Firewall products and their management, data-plane, platform, and ecosystem integrations.
• Validate end-to-end workflows across firewall management, threat inspection, routing, switching, NAT, VPN, identity, logging, policy deployment, and related security capabilities.
• Test complex deployment topologies, including standalone, high-availability, clustered, multi-instance, virtualized, and cloud-based environments.
• Perform feature integration, system, regression, upgrade, rollback, backward-compatibility, resiliency, recovery, scale, stress, and longevity testing.
• Design, implement, maintain, and troubleshoot automated tests using Python-based frameworks and supporting tools.
• Build, configure, and maintain representative test environments containing network devices, security appliances, traffic generators, virtual machines, and cloud resources.
• Reproduce, isolate, and characterize complex software and system failures using packet captures, logs, traces, core files, system metrics, and diagnostic tools.
• Document defects with clear reproduction procedures, technical evidence, business impact, and severity justification.
• Participate in feature handoffs, technical reviews, test-plan reviews, defect triage, and cross-functional quality reviews.
• Use AI-assisted engineering and testing tools where appropriate to accelerate test design, failure analysis, and automation development while validating outputs and protecting confidential information.

Skills

Test planning

Risk-based testing

Python scripting

Linux administration

AI-assisted testing

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Tools

pyATS

pytest

Wireshark

tcpdump

Git

CI/CD

Job description

Cisco Systems, Inc. is seeking a Software Quality Engineer to own test areas for Secure Firewall solutions across physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

You will lead risk-based test planning and execution, collaborating with development, platform, and release teams to ensure robust product quality. The role emphasizes Python automation, Linux expertise, and experience with AI-assisted testing, with opportunities to design and maintain complex test environments and regression suites.