Senior Principal Solution Test & Automation Engineer - Customer Engagement

Senior Principal Solution Test & Automation Engineer - Customer Engagement

Location (HYBRID):
Sunnyvale, CA

This role has been designed as 'Hybrid' with a requirement that you will work on average 2 days per week from an HPE office.

HPE Networking is seeking a Senior Principal Solution Test & Automation Engineer to lead quality engineering for large-scale networking and distributed software solutions. This is a highly technical Individual Contributor role requiring substantial technical impact on strategic products, architectural initiatives, and customer success. The role combines deep software testing expertise, system-level engineering knowledge, customer engagement, and technical leadership. The successful candidate will serve as a go-to authority for complex quality engineering challenges, drive innovation in automation and validation, and influence product quality, scalability, observability, and reliability across the entire product lifecycle.

You will partner closely with engineering, architecture, product management, sales engineering, services, support, and customers to validate complex networking solutions, establish scalable quality engineering practices, and deliver long-lasting improvements to engineering productivity and product quality. In addition to technical execution, you will provide leadership across functions, mentor engineers, and help define the future direction of solution validation and automation.

Success in this role requires substantial technical impact on significant products and programs, recognized expertise within the organization, leadership across functions, delivery of long-lasting test engineering improvements, mentorship of technical talent, and innovation that advances customer outcomes and business objectives.

• Understand customer deployments, business requirements, architectures, and large-scale operational environments to develop comprehensive validation strategies.
• Lead validation efforts for strategic customer solutions and complex networking deployments.
• Collaborate with customers, field engineers, solution architects, sales engineers, and services teams to validate real-world networking solutions and operational readiness.
• Participate in and influence technical design workshops, architecture reviews, and strategic planning discussions to improve reliability, scalability, observability, and serviceability.
• Translate customer requirements into repeatable, solution-focused validation frameworks.
• Present technical findings, risk assessments, quality recommendations, and executive-level updates to customers and internal stakeholders.
• Drive cross-functional initiatives that improve customer outcomes and product quality.

• Define and drive automation strategy across products, programs, and engineering teams.
• Architect, develop, and evolve scalable automation frameworks supporting functional, integration, system, resiliency, scale, performance, and solution validation.
• Establish engineering best practices and standards for continuous validation through CI/CD pipelines.
• Lead innovation in automation infrastructure, tooling, and AI-assisted engineering practices.
• Drive organization-wide adoption of quality engineering methodologies that improve time-to-market and engineering productivity.
• Identify opportunities to simplify validation workflows and reduce operational costs through automation.

• Lead validation of distributed, multi-component software and networking platforms at scale.
• Execute and automate regression, longevity, fault-injection, recovery, scalability, interoperability, and performance testing.
• Utilize logs, metrics, traces, telemetry, observability platforms, and diagnostic frameworks to troubleshoot complex failures.
• Lead root-cause investigations spanning multiple teams and technology domains
• Differentiate product defects from infrastructure, automation, and environmental issues.
• Influence architecture and design decisions to improve product testability, diagnosability, and operational excellence.

• Provide technical leadership for strategic initiatives, major releases, and architectural programs.
• Serve as a recognized authority for solution validation, automation, and quality engineering.
• Lead and connect engineering teams across functions to align around common quality objectives.
• Drive quality-first engineering practices throughout the development…