Join Tigera as a QA Engineer to own quality for Lynx, a product at the intersection of Kubernetes, runtime telemetry, and AI.
Posted by employer 2 months ago
First seen on Joblaze 2 months ago
Last verified on the company career page 4 days ago
Skills & Technologies
Role intensity
70% hands-on coding
AI in the day-to-day
Use of Claude Code internally is expected; we build with AI, and we test the things we build with it.
Requirements
- Experience
- 5+ years
Not disclosed in this posting: compensation, visa sponsorship.
Benefits
Joblaze summary
The QA Engineer at Tigera plays a crucial role in ensuring the quality of the Lynx product by developing and implementing comprehensive test strategies and automation processes. This position requires expertise in testing distributed systems, particularly within Kubernetes environments, and a strong focus on automation over manual testing. Ideal candidates will have significant experience in software QA, a solid understanding of AI-driven applications, and the ability to communicate effectively within a collaborative team. Tigera's dynamic environment offers the opportunity to shape quality practices for a new product while working closely with a dedicated engineering team.
Joblaze insights
Quick facts
- Is the Senior SDET role remote?
- It's hybrid — Tigera expects some on-site time in Vancouver.
- How much experience is required?
- At least 5 years of relevant experience for this Senior SDET role.
- Where is the role based?
- Tigera is hiring for this position in Vancouver.
- What's the tech stack?
- Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: AI/ML, CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes, Python.
- What seniority level is this role?
- Tigera targets mid-level candidates for this position.
- Is this full-time or contract?
- Full-time for this Senior SDET role at Tigera.
From the original posting
Tigera—the pioneer behind Calico and Lynx—is defining the future of AI agent security, workload governance, and cloud-native networking. As autonomous AI agents, LLM frameworks, and microservices proliferate across enterprise infrastructure, Tigera delivers the deep visibility, runtime protection, and eBPF-driven enforcement control required to secure the next generation of computing.
About Your Role
Tigera is hiring a Senior SDET to own quality for Calico’s converged networking, the capability that lets enterprises run virtual machines and containers side by side on Kubernetes. Enterprises are migrating large VM estates onto Kubernetes at speed, and the networking carrying those workloads sits squarely on the critical path: a half-migrated cluster that silently drops traffic isn’t a bug someone files next sprint, it’s an outage. You will own the test strategy for that surface end to end, deciding what has to be proved before a release ships, building the Go automation and the environment harnesses that stand up hybrid Kubernetes and VM topologies on demand, and wiring it into CI so every build is exercised against real migration scenarios. This is a hands-on role for someone who treats quality as engineering, not gatekeeping: you’ll write the tests, build the tooling the team depends on, go hunting in the half-migrated and partially-failed states nobody specified, and be the person who can say with evidence whether a release is ready.
We are looking for an engineer who is as comfortable root-causing a packet drop across a cluster as writing the harness that reproduces it, and who turns every field escape into permanent coverage rather than a one-off fix.
For this position, we are looking to hire in Vancouver (Hybrid).
Vancouver Salary Range: CAD $130,000 to CAD $150,000
You Will:
Own the test strategy: Decide what has to be proved before a release is shipped, write the test plans and drive them to done across releases rather than waiting on the work to be assigned.
- Build the automation: integration and system-level suites in Go (unit tests stay with the developers who own the code), plus the tooling and environment harnesses that stand up hybrid Kubernetes and VM topologies on demand and tear them down cleanly.
- Wire it into CI: so every build is exercised against real migration scenarios end to end - provision, deploy, run, report. And keep the signal trustworthy by chasing flakes down instead of rerunning around them.
- Work shoulder to shoulder with developers, PM, and customer success: Push for testability while designs are still open, surface risk early enough that someone can act on it, and give a clear read on release readiness rather than a pass/fail count.
- Break things on purpose: Explore past the written plan, go after the half-migrated and partially-failed states nobody specified, and find the edge cases the developers missed.Turn field escapes into permanent coverage: reproduce the customer's issue, land the regression test, and make sure that class of bug can't come back.
- Turn field escapes into permanent coverage: Reproduce the customer's issue, land the regression test, and make sure that class of bug can't come back
You Have
- 5+ years in quality/test engineering, DevOps, or SRE, with at least 1 of those spent testing networking, infrastructure, or distributed systems (not just application layer). Owning test strategy for a product area, not executing plans written by others.
- Hands on Kubernetes operations knowledge on at least one distribution (kubeadm/upstream, OpenShift, Rancher/RKE, EKS/GKE/AKS): that may include cluster bootstrapping, workload deployment, and independently root causing failures across pods, services, CNI, DNS, RBAC, and ingress.
- Working knowledge of a VM estate: VMware vSphere/ESXi, KVM/libvirt, or Hyper-V. VM networking (bridges, VLANs, trunking, SR-IOV), and how VM resident applications discover and reach each other.
- Comfortable in Linux and solid on networking fundamentals.
- Proficiency in a compiled or scripting language for writing production-quality test code and tooling. Go is the language of our choice and is strongly preferred. However Python or Java with willingness to work primarily in Go is acceptable.
- Designing, implementing, and maintaining end-to-end CI pipelines that provision infrastructure, deploy the product, run suites, and publish results. Plus infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or equivalent) for reproducible, disposable test environments
Nice-to-Have
- Calico or Calico Enterprise, or depth in another CNI; understanding of Kubernetes NetworkPolicy semantics and of extending policy to non-cluster workloads (host endpoints, VM/bare-metal endpoints).
- Linux systems and networking depth: iptables/nftables, ip route/ip rule, network namespaces, tcpdump/conntrack, routing and IPAM concepts. Can diagnose a packet drop end to end without escalating.
- KubeVirt or OpenShift Virtualization: VM workload scheduling on Kubernetes and their networking behaviour, including live migration.
- eBPF familiarity - reading and tracing problems, bpftool, XDP concepts.
- Understanding of IPv6 and dual-stack, overlays and encryption modes.
- Service mesh interaction with CNI and policy (eg. Istio Ambient mesh).
- Scale, soak, and failure-injection testing; test observability and systematic flake triage using Prometheus/Grafana, log aggregation.
With offices in San Francisco, San Jose, Vancouver (Canada), Cork (Ireland), and London (England), we have a thriving team of diverse individuals from all over the world. We believe in a collaborative, flexible work environment based on respect for, and commitment from, every employee. We also offer a competitive compensation package along with full health, vision, and dental benefits. These benefits, coupled with an amazing team of individuals who believe in our mission and value openness, collaboration, and teamwork, make Tigera an awesome place to work.
Standard company text repeated across Tigera's postings is omitted here.