Principal QA Architect

Role Overview: You have an incredible opportunity to join DataDirect Networks (DDN), a global market leader in AI and high-performance data storage innovation for over two decades. As a Principal Architect for Quality Engineering Frameworks, you will play a crucial role in transforming automation into a scalable developer-centric service that validates correctness, performance, resilience, and real-world behavior across highly distributed systems. This hands-on staff-plus role will allow you to define architectural standards, mentor engineers, and have a broad organizational influence. Key Responsibilities: - Framework Architecture: - Own the end-to-end architecture and technical direction of the Python/pytest automation framework. - Define architectural standards, extension points, and long-term evolution. - Make and document architectural tradeoffs through design reviews and Architectural Decision Records. - Ensure the framework scales with system complexity and organizational growth. - Automation Platform and Reusable Tooling: - Design and implement reusable Python libraries, pytest fixtures, and plugins. - Provide a self-service automation platform with a clear, opinionated paved road for developers. - Enable testing of APIs, CLIs, storage systems, and distributed workloads using shared abstractions. - Maintain strict standards for determinism, readability, and maintainability. - System Correctness POSIX S3 and Storage Validation: - Architect automation validating POSIX filesystem semantics, including metadata operations, locking, concurrency, permissions, and consistency. - Validate object block and networked storage systems, including S3-compatible object storage, NVMe/iSCSI, and NFS/SMB. - Ensure correctness under failure scenarios, scale, and sustained load. - Distributed Systems Resilience and Scale: - Design automation covering clustering behavior, membership changes, failover, and recovery. - Validate horizontal and elastic scaling in real deployment conditions. - Extend automation into repeatable resilience and chaos testing beyond simple failure injection. - Performance and Stress Testing: - Integrate performance and stress testing into CI/CD pipelines. - Use tools such as fio, IOR, Minio, Warp, Mongoose, and MLPerf. - Validate throughput, latency, and stability and continuously detect performance regressions. - Cloud and Execution Environments: - Architect automation to execute consistently across AWS and GCP. - Support execution on Kubernetes, Docker, hypervisors, and bare-metal systems. - Validate cloud-specific behaviors, including autoscaling, contention, networking variability, and zonal failure modes. - Balance execution scale, cost, and feedback time. Qualification Required: - Required Experience: Staff IC (Note: Any additional details of the company were not present in the provided job description.) Role Overview: You have an incredible opportunity to join DataDirect Networks (DDN), a global market leader in AI and high-performance data storage innovation for over two decades. As a Principal Architect for Quality Engineering Frameworks, you will play a crucial role in transforming automation into a scalable developer-centric service that validates correctness, performance, resilience, and real-world behavior across highly distributed systems. This hands-on staff-plus role will allow you to define architectural standards, mentor engineers, and have a broad organizational influence. Key Responsibilities: - Framework Architecture: - Own the end-to-end architecture and technical direction of the Python/pytest automation framework. - Define architectural standards, extension points, and long-term evolution. - Make and document architectural tradeoffs through design reviews and Architectural Decision Records. - Ensure the framework scales with system complexity and organizational growth. - Automation Platform and Reusable Tooling: - Design and implement reusable Python libraries, pytest fixtures, and plugins. - Provide a self-service automation platform with a clear, opinionated paved road for developers. - Enable testing of APIs, CLIs, storage systems, and distributed workloads using shared abstractions. - Maintain strict standards for determinism, readability, and maintainability. - System Correctness POSIX S3 and Storage Validation: - Architect automation validating POSIX filesystem semantics, including metadata operations, locking, concurrency, permissions, and consistency. - Validate object block and networked storage systems, including S3-compatible object storage, NVMe/iSCSI, and NFS/SMB. - Ensure correctness under failure scenarios, scale, and sustained load. - Distributed Systems Resilience and Scale: - Design automation covering clustering behavior, membership changes, failover, and recovery. - Validate horizontal and elastic scaling in real deployment conditi