Principal Software Quality Engineer

The Red Hat Quay team is seeking a Principal Quality Engineer to join a group of passionate professionals developing Red Hat Quay and quay.io. As a Principal Quality Engineer, you will work as a core member of an engineering team, rapidly testing, securing, and releasing new capabilities. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams, including Product Management and Site Reliability Engineers, to gain a deep understanding of features, customer use cases, and technical implementations. This knowledge will enable you to design real-world test plans, build regression test suites, and drive the integration of quality-driven methodologies throughout the software development lifecycle.

You will be responsible for developing and executing both manual and automated tests to accelerate the testing process and improve product quality. Our Quality Engineers are not just black-box testers; they have a deep understanding of software internals, can debug issues, and write automated tests using scripting and user-level automation tools. As an individual contributor, you’ll take ownership of tasks from inception to completion with mínimal oversight, while collaborating with other engineers to ensure best practices and high-quality deliverables.

In this role, you’ll also have the opportunity to engage with open-source communities, contribute to the integration of Red Hat, open-source, and partner technologies into a cohesive platform, and play a critical role in delivering high-quality software to customers and open-source ecosystems.

If you're passionate about building quality solutions for distributed systems, solving complex challenges, and contributing to the next wave of hybrid cloud innovation, we invite you to join our team.

**What you will do**:

- Architect and lead implementation of new features and identify quality improvements for Red Hat Quay and quay.io
- Innovate in the OCI container domain by participating in upstream communities
- Provide technical vision and leadership on critical and high-impact projects
- Ensure non-functional requirements including security, resiliency, and maintainability are met
- Write unit and integration tests and work with quality engineers to ensure product quality
- Use CI/CD best practices to deliver solutions as productization efforts into Quay
- Contribute to a culture of continuous improvement by sharing recommendations and technical knowledge with team members
- Collaborate with product management, other engineering, and cross-functional teams to analyze and clarify business requirements
- Communicate effectively to stakeholders and team members to ensure proper visibility of development efforts
- Mentor, influence, and coach a distributed team of Quality Engineers

**What you will bring**:

- Advanced experience working with OCI container registries and tools like docker, podman, skopeo
- Advanced experience in Kubernetes, OpenShift, or other cloud-native technologies
- Ability to quickly learn and guide others on using new tools and technologies
- Experience with source code management tools such as Git
- Proven ability to innovate and a passion for staying at the forefront of technology.
- Excellent system understanding and troubleshooting capabilities
- Autonomous work ethic, thriving in a dynamic, fast-paced environment.
- Technical leadership acumen in a global team environment
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills

**The following will be considered a plus (use for all three)**:

- While a Bachelor’s degree or higher in computer science or a related discipline is valued, we prioritize practical experience and technical prowess
- Understanding of how Open Source and Free Software communities work
- Experience with development for public cloud services (AWS, GCE, Azure)