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# Principal Software Development Engineer in Test (Performance & Bare-Metal)

- **Company:** Akamai Technologies
- **Location:** Augusta, ME, United States
- **Salary:** $169,300.0 - $304,700.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Systems Engineering, Bash Shell, Data Validation, Software Debugging, Linux, Memory Management, Perl (Programming Language), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Python (Programming Language), Kernel-Based Virtual Machine, Quick EMUlator (QEMU), Subsystems, Strategies of Testing, Performance Testing, Saltstack, Non-Uniform Memory Access, Perf (Linux), Storage Technologies, Bare Metal, SDET, Jenkins, Golang
- **Published:** October 16, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.techcareers.com/job.asp?id=3451604723&tx=KL9797FFU&pt=1&aff=0B19D771-A501-4A5E-8338-2A822B784D54&utm_source=Job%20Feed&utm_medium=textkernel&utm_campaign=DE&utm_term=0B19D771-A501-4A5E-8338-2A822B784D54

## About the Role

* Have 12 years in testing, including performance testing, hypervisor platforms, and systems engineering or its equivalent
 * Possess experience in KVM/QEMU/libvirt internals, VM-exits, and NUMA/cache effects on performance.
 * Have experience in debug across architectures (x86, ARM) on bare metal and emulated environments, isolating failure root causes.
 * Have good Linux fundamentals: scheduler, memory management, I/O subsystems, storage architectures, and block devices.
 * Demonstrate statistical thinking: experimental design, baseline analysis, variance control, and stakeholder communication.
 * Have proficiency in Linux perf, VTune, eBPF, Bash, Jenkins, and SaltStack.

## Description

Our team's mission is to accelerate innovation by making computing simple, scalable, accessible, and affordable for all. We provide the infrastructure and services that enable developers to build next-generation applications. We take ownership of the design and development of core compute interfaces, virtualization management, APIs, and low-level platform services.

Partner with the best

As a Principal Software Development Engineer in Test, you will own VM/fleet test strategy, performance quality gates, and hypervisor behavior validation across the IaaS platform.

As a Principal Software Development Engineer in Test, you will be responsible for:

 * Defining and owning test strategy for hypervisor behavior, VM performance, and fleet-level quality gates; mentoring SDETs on statistical rigor and systems-level testing.
 * Designing reproducible test environments that emulate bare-metal VM conditions using containers, validating data integrity, without requiring physical hardware.
 * Developing automated performance benchmarks with statistical baselines, change-point detection, and regression gating for CI/CD pipelines.
 * Collaborating with product and SRE to define SLO measurement and validate deployment safety and rollback strategies.
 * Writing test harnesses and performance analysis pipelines in Go, Python, and Perl.