We are seeking an exceptional Staff Software Engineer in Test to join our Web Application Firewall (WAF) team as a quality leader and technical architect. This critical role combines deep QA expertise with customer-facing responsibilities, serving as the quality champion for our enterprise customers and engineering teams. You will be the go-to expert for complex customer quality escalations, test architecture, and ensuring our WAF solutions meet the highest standards of reliability, security, and performance.
As a Staff QA Engineer on the WAF team, you'll work at the intersection of quality assurance, cybersecurity, and customer success. You'll design comprehensive test strategies for complex security scenarios, validate customer deployments, debug production quality issues, and ensure our enterprise customers can deploy our WAF with confidence. This role requires someone who can think strategically about quality architecture while being hands-on enough to write test code, analyze test results, and investigate customer-reported issues.
Responsibilities:
Quality Architecture & Test Strategy Leadership
Design and architect comprehensive test strategies for WAF security rules, threat detection, and attack mitigation capabilities
Define quality standards, testing methodologies, and acceptance criteria for enterprise-grade WAF deployments
Create test frameworks and automation infrastructure for functional, security, performance, and integration testing
Develop reference test architectures for various deployment scenarios (cloud, on-premise, hybrid, multi-CDN)
Lead test strategy reviews and provide guidance on test coverage, regression testing, and quality metrics
Establish best practices for security testing, including OWASP Top 10 validation, false positive/negative testing, and attack simulation
Enterprise Customer Quality Support & Escalations
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Serve as the primary quality escalation point for critical enterprise customer issues and deployment challenges
Conduct deep-dive investigations into customer-reported bugs, performance degradations, false positives/negatives, and configuration issues
Work directly with customer security, QA, and DevOps teams to validate WAF deployments, reproduce issues, and verify fixes
Design and execute customer-specific test scenarios to validate WAF configurations before production deployment
Provide technical QA expertise during customer war rooms, helping troubleshoot and validate fixes for security incidents
Build strong relationships with enterprise customers, becoming their trusted advisor for quality and testing practices
Security & Network Testing Expertise
Design and execute comprehensive security test cases for OWASP Top 10, zero-day vulnerabilities, and emerging attack vectors
Validate WAF detection capabilities against real-world attack patterns, payloads, and evasion techniques
Develop test harnesses for complex networking scenarios across Layer 3-7, including TLS/SSL, HTTP/2, WebSockets, gRPC, and HTTP/3
Create automated tests for DDoS mitigation, bot detection, API security, and application-layer attack scenarios
Validate WAF performance under various load conditions, attack patterns, and traffic profiles
Test edge cases involving protocol violations, malformed requests, and RFC compliance
Collaborate with security research teams to translate threat intelligence into comprehensive test coverage
Test Automation & Tooling Development
Build and maintain robust test automation frameworks for WAF rule testing, traffic replay, and attack simulation
Develop tools for log analysis, metrics collection, and automated validation of security events
Create performance testing infrastructure to validate WAF throughput, latency, and resource utilization at scale
Implement CI/CD test pipelines for continuous validation of WAF rules and detection capabilities
Design test data generation tools for creating realistic traffic patterns, attack payloads, and edge cases
Build customer environment simulation frameworks to reproduce production issues in test environments
Quality Leadership & Process Improvement
Mentor QA engineers and developers on testing best practices, security testing, and quality methodologies
Drive quality metrics, defect analysis, and root cause investigations for production issues
Participate in design reviews to provide testability feedback and identify potential quality risks
Champion shift-left testing practices and test-driven development within the engineering team
Participate in on-call rotations for critical enterprise customer quality issues
Experience
8+ years of software quality assurance and test engineering experience, with at least 3 years in security-focused testing roles
3+ years testing WAF, firewalls, CDN, load balancers, reverse proxies, or similar security/networking products
Proven track record of handling enterprise customer quality escalations and validating complex deployments
Experience designing and implementing test automation frameworks for large-scale distributed systems
Strong background in customer-facing QA roles such as quality engineering for enterprise products, technical support, or solutions validation
Technical Skills
Core Security & Networking Testing:
Deep understanding of web application security testing including OWASP Top 10 validation, penetration testing methodologies, and vulnerability assessment
Expert-level knowledge of HTTP/HTTPS protocol testing, including header validation, state management, caching behavior, and RFC compliance testing
Strong understanding of TLS/SSL testing, including certificate validation, cipher suite testing, and security vulnerability verification
Proficiency with network protocol testing, TCP/IP validation, DNS testing, and packet-level analysis
Experience with security testing tools such as OWASP ZAP, Burp Suite, ModSecurity testing, vulnerability scanners, and fuzzing tools
Expertise in attack simulation and payload generation for injection attacks, XSS, CSRF, and other web vulnerabilities
Test Automation & Engineering:
Strong programming skills in Python, Go, Java, or similar languages for test automation development
Experience building test frameworks using tools like pytest, JUnit, TestNG, Robot Framework, or custom solutions
Proficiency with API testing tools and frameworks (Postman, REST Assured, GraphQL testing)
Experience with performance testing tools (JMeter, Gatling, Locust, k6) and load generation at scale
Knowledge of CI/CD platforms (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) and automated test integration
Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and infrastructure-as-code for test environment provisioning
Experience with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) for test environment management
Debugging & Analysis:
Expertise using network analysis tools (Wireshark, tcpdump, mitmproxy, Charles Proxy) for traffic inspection and debugging
Proficiency with log analysis and correlation across distributed systems to investigate quality issues
Experience with performance profiling and identifying bottlenecks in high-throughput security systems
Ability to read and analyze network traces, application logs, and security events to reproduce and validate defects
Strong skills in test data analysis, metrics visualization, and quality reporting
QA Methodologies & Practices
Expertise in black-box, white-box, and grey-box testing techniques
Strong understanding of exploratory testing, especially for security and edge case scenarios
Experience with regression testing strategies and test prioritization
Knowledge of test design techniques including boundary value analysis, equivalence partitioning, and state transition testing
Familiarity with quality metrics such as defect density, test coverage, escape rate, and mean time to detection
Soft Skills & Attributes
Exceptional communication skills with the ability to explain quality issues and test results to both technical and non-technical audiences
Strong customer empathy and commitment to ensuring customer deployments meet quality standards
Detail-oriented with a passion for finding edge cases and potential failure scenarios
Calm under pressure during critical customer escalations and production quality incidents
Collaborative mindset with a track record of working effectively with development, security, and customer success teams
Self-directed with the ability to manage ambiguity and prioritize testing efforts effectively
Security-first mindset with a passion for protecting applications and ensuring security controls work as intended
Preferred Qualifications
Experience with chaos engineering and resilience testing for distributed systems
Contributions to open-source testing tools or security testing frameworks
