Principal QA Engineer

TL;

DR:
We're seeking a Principal Quality Engineer to elevate quality engineering across Cloudsmith - strengthening quality practices across engineering teams, shaping our testing strategy, and ensuring the platform meets the reliability standards required by critical infrastructure.

About Cloudsmith Cloudsmith is building the operating system for the modern software supply chain.

We run a global, fully managed, multi-tenant SaaS platform that helps organizations, from startups to the Fortune 500, secure, govern, and distribute software artifacts ldwide, our customers use Cloudsmith as a critical infrastructure control plane for CI/CD, developer workflows, security controls, compliance, and software distribution, supporting 30+ formats and ecosystems across languages, containers, and operating systems.

We recently raised our Series C to accelerate Cloudsmith 2.0: deeper artifact intelligence, stronger policy and provenance, faster package-aware delivery, and infrastructure built for engineering teams, as well as the modern AI-driven software factory.

By developers, for developers: we care about craft, architecture, and enterprise scale.

The Role As a Principal Quality Engineer, you’ll be the person who shapes what quality engineering looks like at Cloudsmith - embedding quality thinking into how every engineering team works, and raising the bar across the entire organization. That means improving testability at every stage of the product development lifecycle, treating testing as a continuous activity that runs alongside development, and helping engineers take genuine ownership of quality in their own work.

You’ll be joining an engineering culture that moves fast and ships regularly and you’ll help us build the confidence and practices that mean we can keep doing that sustainably, at the scale and reliability our customers depend on.

The leverage in this role comes from the capability you build in the teams around it. You’ll work closely with engineering leadership, principal engineers, and the squads delivering our platform - coaching, facilitating, and creating the space for teams to drive their own quality practices. The goal is an engineering organization that is permanently more capable: one where quality is an emergent property of how people and systems interact.

Key Responsibilities Drive the quality engineering strategy across the platform. You’ll define Cloudsmith’s approach to quality - how we test, what we measure, and what confidence we need before we ship. That strategy needs to work for a platform operating at the scale and reliability expectations of critical infrastructure.

Build quality capability in engineering teams. You’ll pair with engineers, run workshops, facilitate risk and coverage conversations, and create the conditions for teams to develop their own quality instincts. The aim is engineers who think about testability from the design/discovery stages and make confident, well-reasoned testing decisions - with decreasing reliance on you to do it for them.

Define the measures that matter. You’ll design the quality metrics that tell us whether we’re improving and help us make better decisions about reliability, quality, and performance.

Shape how we build and ship safely. You’ll work with engineering and platform teams on the quality implications of how we deploy - including the intersection of our feature flagging strategy, canary deployment ambitions, and the blast radius reduction we need when things go wrong.

Raise the quality culture across the engineering organization. You’ll contribute through documentation, internal talks, working group facilitation, and by being the person others turn to when they’re making hard tradeoffs about coverage, risk, and testability.

Required Experience, Qualities & Skills Significant hands-on experience in quality engineering roles, with a track record that includes defining and delivering testing strategy at an organizational level. We’d typically expect 8+ years in QA or quality engineering, with the last few at senior or lead level.

Proven experience testing at scale on distributed cloud infrastructure - you’ve worked on platforms with high…