Senior Principal Solution Test & Automation Engineer - Customer Engagement

This role has been designed as ‘Hybrid’ with a requirement that you will work on average 2 days per week from an HPE office., HPE Networking is seeking a Senior Principal Solution Test & Automation Engineer to lead quality engineering for large-scale networking and distributed software solutions. This is a highly technical Individual Contributor role requiring substantial technical impact on strategic products, architectural initiatives, and customer success. The role combines deep software testing expertise, system-level engineering knowledge, customer engagement, and technical leadership. The successful candidate will serve as a go-to authority for complex quality engineering challenges, drive innovation in automation and validation, and influence product quality, scalability, observability, and reliability across the entire product lifecycle.

You will partner closely with engineering, architecture, product management, sales engineering, services, support, and customers to validate complex networking solutions, establish scalable quality engineering practices, and deliver long-lasting improvements to engineering productivity and product quality. In addition to technical execution, you will provide leadership across functions, mentor engineers, and help define the future direction of solution validation and automation.

Success in this role requires substantial technical impact on significant products and programs, recognized expertise within the organization, leadership across functions, delivery of long-lasting test engineering improvements, mentorship of technical talent, and innovation that advances customer outcomes and business objectives.

Solution Validation & Customer Engagement

• Understand customer deployments, business requirements, architectures, and large-scale operational environments to develop comprehensive validation strategies.
• Lead validation efforts for strategic customer solutions and complex networking deployments.
• Collaborate with customers, field engineers, solution architects, sales engineers, and services teams to validate real-world networking solutions and operational readiness.
• Participate in and influence technical design workshops, architecture reviews, and strategic planning discussions to improve reliability, scalability, observability, and serviceability.
• Translate customer requirements into repeatable, solution-focused validation frameworks.
• Present technical findings, risk assessments, quality recommendations, and executive-level updates to customers and internal stakeholders.
• Drive cross-functional initiatives that improve customer outcomes and product quality.

Automation & Quality Engineering

• Define and drive automation strategy across products, programs, and engineering teams.
• Architect, develop, and evolve scalable automation frameworks supporting functional, integration, system, resiliency, scale, performance, and solution validation.
• Establish engineering best practices and standards for continuous validation through CI/CD pipelines.
• Lead innovation in automation infrastructure, tooling, and AI-assisted engineering practices.
• Drive organization-wide adoption of quality engineering methodologies that improve time-to-market and engineering productivity.
• Identify opportunities to simplify validation workflows and reduce operational costs through automation.

System-Level Testing & Debugging

• Lead validation of distributed, multi-component software and networking platforms at scale.
• Execute and automate regression, longevity, fault-injection, recovery, scalability, interoperability, and performance testing.
• Utilize logs, metrics, traces, telemetry, observability platforms, and diagnostic frameworks to troubleshoot complex failures.
• Lead root-cause investigations spanning multiple teams and technology domains.
• Differentiate product defects from infrastructure, automation, and environmental issues.
• Influence architecture and design decisions to improve product testability, diagnosability, and operational excellence.

Technical Leadership

• Provide technical leadership for strategic initiatives, major releases, and architectural programs.
• Serve as a recognized authority for solution validation, automation, and quality engineering.
• Lead and connect engineering teams across functions to align around common quality objectives.
• Drive quality-first engineering practices throughout the development lifecycle.
• Mentor engineers through technical guidance, reviews, coaching, and knowledge sharing.
• Contribute to technical innovation through patents, white papers, standards participation, publications, and architectural proposals.
• Build long-term technical capabilities that create recurring business value and customer impact.

Software Engineering & Automation

• Expert-level programming expertise in Python, Go, or C++, with deep proficiency in at least one language.
• Extensive experience designing and building automation platforms, frameworks, and quality engineering ecosystems.
• Experience integrating large-scale automated testing into CI/CD environments.
• Proven history of driving transformational automation initiatives.

Systems & Networking

• Strong understanding of Linux/UNIX operating systems, networking, processes, memory management, and system internals.
• Extensive experience validating distributed and multi-component systems.
• Deep hands-on expertise configuring and validating multi-vendor networking environments.
• Experience supporting service provider, enterprise, and cloud networking deployments.
• Strong knowledge of performance testing and traffic-generation platforms such as Ixia and Spirent.

Testing & Quality Engineering

• Deep expertise in system-level and end-to-end validation.
• Multi-feature, longevity, resiliency, interoperability, scale, and performance testing.
• Fault injection and recovery validation.
• Root-cause analysis and complex defect investigation.
• Advanced troubleshooting across multiple software and infrastructure layers.

Leadership & Influence

• Demonstrated history of leading significant technical initiatives with measurable business impact.
• Proven ability to influence engineering decisions, architecture, and strategic direction.
• Experience mentoring engineers and leading cross-functional technical initiatives., * Advanced networking expertise in Layer 2, Layer 3, TCP/IP, Routing, MPLS, EVPN, and data center technologies.
• Experience with network operating systems, cloud infrastructure, observability platforms, and distributed architectures.
• Working knowledge of JUNOS.
• Industry certifications such as JNCIE, CCIE, or equivalent.
• Experience leveraging AI-assisted engineering tools for automation development, test generation, diagnostics, failure analysis, and productivity improvements.
• Track record of innovation resulting in patents, publications, standards contributions, or architectural leadership.

“The expected salary/wage range for this position is provided below. Actual offer may vary from this range based upon geographic location, work experience, education/training, and/or skill level.

• United States of America: Annual Salary USD 183,000 - 370,500 in California The listed salary range reflects base salary. Variable incentives may also be offered.”

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the global edge-to-cloud company advancing the way people live and work. We help companies connect, protect, analyze, and act on their data and applications wherever they live, from edge to cloud, so they can turn insights into outcomes at the speed required to thrive in today’s complex world. Our culture thrives on finding new and better ways to accelerate what’s next. We know varied backgrounds are valued and succeed here. We have the flexibility to manage our work and personal needs. We make bold moves, together, and are a force for good. If you are looking to stretch and grow your career our culture will embrace you. Open up opportunities with HPE.