Principal Software Engineer - Python

Company Description

At WD, our vision is to power global innovation and push the boundaries of technology to make what you thought was once impossible, possible.

At our core, WD is a company of problem solvers. People achieve extraordinary things given the right technology. For decades, we’ve been doing just that—our technology helped people put a man on the moon and capture the first-ever picture of a black hole.

We offer an expansive portfolio of technologies, HDDs, and platforms for business, creative professionals, and consumers alike under our Western Digital®, WD®, and WD_BLACK™.

We are a key partner to some of the largest and highest-growth organizations in the world. From enabling systems to make cities safer and more connected, to powering the data centers behind many of the world’s biggest companies and hyperscale cloud providers, to meeting the massive and ever-growing data storage needs of the AI era, WD is fueling a brighter, smarter future.

Today’s exceptional challenges require your unique skills. Together, we can build the future of data storage.

Job Description

Most software engineers spend careers wondering if their work matters. In this role, you'll know. You're building the tools that WD's global Quality organization depends on to validate every product that ships. Your users are your colleagues. Their pain points are your backlog. When you ship something, you see it adopted.

Our team in Rochester, MN is looking for a Principal Engineer to join a focused, collaborative group building and maintaining internal software tools and automation infrastructure. This is a hands-on individual contributor role on an established team — the right person wants to do excellent technical work, take ownership of hard problems, and make a direct impact on engineering productivity across a global organization.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, document, and validate software tools used by quality engineers worldwide
• Serve as a primary contributor to our automated test orchestration platform which handles environment configuration, test sequencing, and results management
• Collaborate with test execution engineers and technology experts to understand requirements and translate them into well-designed solutions
• Communicate feature value clearly to users and stakeholders, supporting tool adoption across teams
• Participate in code reviews and contribute to feature design discussions with peer developers

Qualifications

Required

• BS or MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or Mathematics
• Strong Python skills applied in professional software projects
• Demonstrated experience with object-oriented design in production codebases
• Ability to troubleshoot Linux systems via command line
• Experience with Docker and microservice architecture

Preferred

• Experience with RESTful API design and web frameworks such as FastAPI
• Experience with event driven architecture
• Experience with NoSQL database interaction
• Familiarity with unit and integration test frameworks such as pytest and behave
• Experience writing Ansible playbooks
• Understanding of storage industry hardware (HDDs) and associated infrastructure

Salary Ranges: 117,200.00-156,300.00

Additional Information

WD is committed to providing equal opportunities to all applicants and employees and will not discriminate against any applicant or employee based on their race, color, ancestry, religion (including religious dress and grooming standards), sex (including pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, breastfeeding or related medical conditions), gender (including a person’s gender identity, gender expression, and gender-related appearance and behavior, whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth), age, national origin, sexual orientation, medical condition, marital status (including domestic partnership status), physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, protected medical and family care leave, Civil Air Patrol status, military and veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. We also prohibit harassment of any individual on any of the characteristics listed above. Our non-discrimination policy applies to all aspects of employment. We comply with the laws and regulations set forth in the "Know Your Rights: Workplace Discrimination is Illegal” poster. Our pay transparency policy is available