QA Staff Engineer

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
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 re