Job Title: System Test Engineer
Location: Santa Clara, CA OR Costa Rica
Duration: 12 Months
About the role
FlashBlade//EXA is Pure Storage''s disaggregated, exascale storage platform for AI factories — a fleet of metadata nodes (MDN) and commodity data nodes (DN) connected over pNFS, RDMA, and gRPC control channels, running a EverPure Purity//DN OS on off-the-shelf hardware. That combination — heterogeneous hardware, a custom OS image, a control/data-plane split, and deployment into performance-sensitive HPC/AI and NeoCloud environments — means system-level validation is as critical to //EXA''s competitiveness as the performance engineering itself: a fleet that can''t be reliably configured, upgraded, and diagnosed in the field undermines every throughput and latency claim.. This role owns that validation layer: proving the platform holds up as real hardware, firmware, networking, and operating system state, not just as an architecture diagram.
What you''ll do
- System Testing for the FlashBlade//EXA product line.
- Validate software configuration end-to-end. Test configuration management across MDN and DN roles — geometry construction/distribution, export and pack-group configuration, node onboarding — ensuring config changes propagate correctly and safely across the fleet.
- Test networking at a working-knowledge depth. Validate the system''s network-dependent behavior: RDMA/data-path connectivity between clients and DNs, control-channel (gRPC/TCP) reachability, VIP/failover behavior, and network-induced fault conditions (link flaps, partition, degraded fabric) — enough networking depth to design and troubleshoot these test scenarios independently.
- Filing and owning related bugs (documenting, debugging, follow-up with Dev teams, reproduce, etc)
- Own and drive features to completion (review requirements, design docs, customer use cases to build test strategies, test cases, and end-to-end workflows in the System Test ecosystem for new and existing features over multiple releases)
- Build up and scale-out of complex system testbeds and test ecosystems using virtualized environments and various test tools.
- Build and maintain CI/CD test infrastructure. Own Jenkins pipelines and Docker-based test environments for system and platform test suites — reproducible test builds, scheduled regression runs, and fast feedback for engineering.
- Automate via scripting. Write and maintain Python and Shell tooling for test orchestration, environment setup/teardown, log collection, and result validation across MDN/DN clusters.
- Own foundation / platform testing. Validate the base platform underneath the data-plane features — DNOS image provisioning, node bring-up, hardware/OS compatibility, platform-level health and telemetry — the layer everything else in //EXA depends on.
- Test firmware upgrade and maintenance workflows. Validate FW upgrade paths on data-node hardware (including Viking dual-node/HA configurations) for correctness, rollback safety, and no-downtime operation — upgrades must not compromise the HA guarantees the platform advertises.
- Work on Customer Escalations with cross-functional teams to help identify root causes and provide assistance with reproductions.
- Troubleshoot at the linux kernel level. Diagnose failures directly on DNOS/Linux hosts — kernel logs, systemd/service state, filesystem and storage stack issues, network stack behavior — and turn root causes into actionable bug reports or regression tests.
What makes you competitive for this role
- Experience in System Testing with the ability to create end-to-end test ecosystems from the ground up and maintain it over time. Understand the nature of a workflow vs a functional test
- Knowledge of flash storage, file systems/protocols: Flash media, Read/Write IOPS, IO datapath, NFS, SMB, S3, and networking layers (full-stack QA)
- Solid software configuration management experience — comfortable validating config propagation and drift in a distributed, multi-node system.
- Mid-level networking knowledge: TCP/IP fundamentals, RDMA/RoCE or InfiniBand exposure a plus, comfortable diagnosing connectivity and fabric-level issues.
- Experience with switching/fabric configuration (Nvidia/Mellanox, Cisco, Arista) in the areas of BGP, ECMP, VLAN, RoCE
- Hands-on DevOps skills — Jenkins pipeline authoring/maintenance and Docker-based test environments. IaC orchestration (Ansible, Terraform)
- Strong scripting ability in Python and Shell for test automation and tooling.
- Experience with foundation/platform-level testing (OS image, hardware bring-up, base system health, component level HA, fault injection, stress testing) rather than only feature-level testing.
- Direct experience testing firmware upgrade and maintenance procedures, ideally on multi-node or HA hardware.
- Strong Linux fundamentals and troubleshooting instincts — able to root-cause from logs and system state rather than guesswork.
- Designing System Test Strategy (System test Plans, Topologies, Coverage design)
- Performance / Load / Workload Simulation over NFSv4.1, NFSv3 and S3 protocols
- Experience in building out and working with Virtualized environments is a plus (VMware, KVM, OpenStack)
Why this role matters
//EXA''s performance and reliability claims only hold up if the fleet can actually be configured, networked, upgraded, and debugged correctly at scale in the field. This role is the check on that: the person who proves the platform survives real-world configuration drift, firmware upgrades, and network failures before customers in HPC and NeoCloud environments do.
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