QA Staff Engineer (WAF)

Role & 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 reviews to provide testability feedback and identify potential quality risks
• Champion shift-left testing practices and test-driven development within the engineering team
• Participate in on-call rotations for critical enterprise customer quality issues

Preferred candidate profile

• 8+ years of software quality assurance and test engineering experience, with at least 3 years in security-focused testing roles
• 3+ years testing WAF, firewalls, CDN, load balancers, reverse proxies, or similar security/networking products
• Proven track record of handling enterprise customer quality escalations and validating complex deployments
• Experience designing and implementing test automation frameworks for large-scale distributed systems
• Strong background in customer-facing QA roles such as quality engineering for enterprise products, technical support, or solutions validation