Principal Software Engineer Python

Job Description

Most software engineers spend careers wondering if their work matters. In this role, you'll know. You're building the tools that WD's global Quality organization depends on to validate every product that ships. Your users are your colleagues. Their pain points are your backlog. When you ship something, you see it adopted.

Our team in Rochester, MN is looking for a Principal Engineer to join a focused, collaborative group building and maintaining internal software tools and automation infrastructure. This is a hands‑on individual contributor role on an established team — the right person wants to do excellent technical work, take ownership of hard problems, and make a direct impact on engineering productivity across a global organization.

• Design, implement, document, and validate software tools used by quality engineers worldwide
• Serve as a primary contributor to our automated test orchestration platform which handles environment configuration, test sequencing, and results management
• Collaborate with test execution engineers and technology experts to understand requirements and translate them into well-designed solutions
• Communicate feature value clearly to users and stakeholders, supporting tool adoption across teams
• Participate in code reviews and contribute to feature design discussions with peer developers

• BS or MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or Mathematics
• Strong Python skills applied in professional software projects
• Demonstrated experience with object-oriented design in production codebases
  
  Ability to troubleshoot Linux systems via command line
• Experience with Docker and microservice architecture

• Experience with RESTful API design and web frameworks such as FastAPI
• Experience with event driven architecture
• Experience with No
  
  SQL database interaction
• Familiarity with unit and integration test frameworks such as pytest and behave
• Experience writing Ansible playbooks
• Understanding of storage industry hardware (HDDs) and associated infrastructure

Salary Ranges:

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• An employee’s pay position within the salary range may be based on several factors including but not limited to (1) relevant education; qualifications; certifications; and experience; (2) skills, ability, knowledge of the job; (3) performance, contribution and results; (4) geographic location; (5) shift; (6) internal and external equity; and (7) business and organizational needs.
• The salary range is what we believe to be the range of possible compensation for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range and this range is only applicable for jobs to be performed in California, Colorado, New York or remote jobs that can be performed in California, Colorado and New York.
  
  This range may be modified in the future.
• If your position is non-exempt, you are eligible for overtime pay pursuant to company policy and applicable laws. You may also be eligible for shift differential pay, depending on the shift to which you are assigned.
• You will be eligible to be considered for bonuses under either WD’s Short Term Incentive Plan (“STI Plan”) or the Sales Incentive Plan (“SIP”) which provides incentive awards based on Company and individual performance, depending on your role and your performance. You may be eligible to participate in our annual Long-Term Incentive (LTI) program, which consists of restricted stock units (RSUs) or cash equivalents, pursuant to the terms of the LTI plan.
  
  Please note that not all roles are eligible to participate in the LTI program, and not all roles are eligible for equity under the LTI plan. RSU awards are also available to eligible new hires, subject to WD's Standard Terms and Conditions for Restricted Stock Unit Awards.
• We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including paid vacation time; paid sick leave; medical/dental/vision insurance; life, accident and disability insurance; tax-advantaged flexible spending and health savings accounts; employee assistance program; other voluntary benefit programs such as…