Performance QE Engineer – distributed storage platform
DDN is hiring a Performance Automation Engineer to help build and extend our automated benchmarking infrastructure for the RED (Infinia) storage platform — covering S3, Block/CSI, and POSIX/HPC I/O paths, from test orchestration through results collection and dashboards.
The role requires knowledge & experience in storage performance testing, automation, and system‑level benchmarking, along with strong Python and Ansible skills to build scalable, repeatable test frameworks.
What You’ll Do
Work upon performance testing for a large‑scale distributed storage platform supporting S3 object storage, POSIX file systems, and block‑level protocols.
Write and maintain Ansible playbooks/roles for cluster setup, health checks, and install/configuration
Contribute to Celery-based task orchestration for running I/O workloads in parallel
Execute and troubleshoot storage benchmarks: FIO, IOR, mdtest, IO500, WARP
Write Python scripts for parsing results, generating manifests, and normalizing metrics
Help maintain the PostgreSQL results schema and Grafana dashboards
Assist with test reporting integration
Debug test failures and flaky pipeline run across protocols
Contribute new benchmark profiles (YAML workload definitions) under review
Work closely with developers to validate fixes and feature performance impact.
What You Bring
Python (2+ yrs): comfortable with scripting, basic async/task-queue concepts (Celery a plus)
Working knowledge of Ansible (writing/modifying playbooks and roles)
Basic SQL skills (PostgreSQL)
Linux fundamentals — filesystems, networking, processes
Exposure to CI/CD tools (GitHub Actions or similar)
Understanding of storage concepts (block/file/object) — willingness to learn benchmarking tools (FIO, IOR, mdtest)
Nice to Have
Prior exposure to Redis/RabbitMQ or any message queue
Grafana or other dashboarding tool experience
Node.js basics
Internship/project experience with performance testing or storage systems
Familiarity with monitoring and metrics tools (Prometheus, Grafana).
Skills Required
- 3+ years of experience in quality assurance, software testing, or a related engineering role
- Strong understanding of software QA methodologies, defect lifecycle management, and test design principles
- Experience writing clear, thorough, and reusable test cases and bug reports
- Familiarity with manual and automated testing approaches
- Experience testing web applications, APIs, and integrated systems
- Experience using logs, diagnostics, and technical data to investigate failures and isolate issues
- Familiarity with defect tracking and test management tools
- Basic scripting or automation experience
- Strong attention to detail and a disciplined, methodical approach to validation
- Good written and verbal communication skills with the ability to collaborate across technical and non-technical teams
- Curiosity, ownership, and a continuous improvement mindset
- Experience with test automation frameworks and CI/CD environments
- Experience validating performance, reliability, or system-level behavior
- Familiarity with Linux environments, command-line tools, or API testing tools
- Exposure to storage, infrastructure, or enterprise software environments
What We Do
DDN is the world’s largest private data storage company and the leading provider of intelligent technology and infrastructure solutions for Enterprise At Scale, AI and analytics, HPC, government and academia customers. Through its DDN and Tintri divisions, the company delivers AI, Data Management software and hardware solutions, and unified analytics frameworks to solve complex business challenges for data-intensive, global organizations. DDN provides its enterprise customers with the most flexible, efficient and reliable data storage solutions for on-premises and multi-cloud environments at any scale. Over the last two decades, DDN has established itself as the data management provider of choice for over 11,000 enterprises, government, and public-sector customers, including many of the world’s leading financial services firms, life science organizations, manufacturing and energy companies, research facilities, and web and cloud service providers.
