Description
As a Software Quality Engineer, you will independently own assigned test areas and validate complex, end-to-end customer workflows across physical, virtual, and cloud environments.
You will work closely with software development, platform, automation, product, and release teams throughout the development lifecycle.
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.
Minimum 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.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience testing network-security products such as firewalls, intrusion prevention or detection systems, secure gateways, or comparable security platforms.
- Strong knowledge of TCP/IP and network troubleshooting.
- Practical experience with Layer 2 and Layer 3 networking, LANs, link aggregation, and interface configurations.
- Experience using packet-analysis and diagnostic tools such as Wireshark, tcpdump, system logs, debuggers, or equivalent utilities.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively across geographically distributed teams.
- Ability to investigate complex failures across multiple interacting components and communicate findings clearly.
- Experience with Cisco Secure Firewall, including FTD, FMC, ASA, FXOS, Snort, or related technologies.
- Experience with Python test frameworks such as pyATS, pytest, or comparable automation platforms.
- Familiarity with REST APIs, Git-based development workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and automated test execution systems.
- Experience validating upgrades, rollback, backward compatibility, configuration migration, and long-running production-like workloads.
- Experience with performance, scale, stress, soak, resiliency, or fault-injection testing.
- Familiarity with virtualization and cloud platforms such as VMware, KVM, AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
- Experience with traffic-generation, protocol-simulation, or network-performance tools.
- Knowledge of security threats, traffic inspection, identity integration, telemetry, logging, and observability.
- Cisco networking or security certification, such as CCNP Enterprise or CCNP Security.
Benefits:
- Medical, dental and vision insurance
- 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution
- Paid parental leave
- Short and long-term disability coverage
- Basic life insurance
- 10 paid holidays per full calendar year
- 1 paid day off for employee’s birthday
- Paid year-end holiday shutdown
- 4 paid days off for personal wellness
- 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year for non-exempt employees
- Flexible vacation time off program for exempt employees
- 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter
- Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer