QA automation engineer for k0rdent KCM team (Contractor for 6 months.)

Company Description

About Mirantis

Mirantis is the Kubernetes-native AI infrastructure company, enabling organizations to build and operate scalable, secure, and sovereign infrastructure for modern AI, machine learning, and data-intensive applications. By combining open source innovation with deep expertise in Kubernetes orchestration, Mirantis empowers platform engineering teams to deliver composable, production-ready developer platforms across any environment—on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge, or in sovereign data centers. As enterprises navigate the growing complexity of AI-driven workloads, Mirantis delivers the automation, GPU orchestration, and policy-driven control needed to manage infrastructure with confidence and agility. Committed to open standards and freedom from lock-in, Mirantis ensures that customers retain full control of their infrastructure strategy.

We serve global leaders including Adobe, PayPal, Liberty Mutual, Splunk, and Volkswagen.  Learn more at www.mirantis.com.

Job Description

Testing Strategy & Leadership

• Contribute to driving the overall QA strategy for Kubernetes and cloud-native environments, aligning quality goals with business objectives and release deadlines.

• Evaluate and champion best-in-class testing best practices and frameworks for distributed systems.

• Lead risk analysis and test planning for large-scale, multi-cloud infrastructure and container orchestration.

Architecting Test Systems

• Architect test frameworks and infrastructure for validating microservices and infrastructure components in multi-cluster and hybrid-cloud environments.

• Oversee the design of complex test scenarios simulating production-like workloads, resource scaling, failure injection, and recovery across distributed clusters.

Automation & Scalability

• Spearhead the development of scalable and maintainable test automation integrated with CI/CD (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, etc.).

• Leverage Kubernetes APIs, Helm, and service mesh tools to build comprehensive automation coverage, including system health, failover behavior, and network resilience.

• Promote test infrastructure-as-code and drive IaC forward on the team making sure the infrastructure code is repeatable, extensible and reliable.

Mentorship & Technical Influence

• Mentor QA engineers and developers in advanced testing techniques such as: risk-based testing, chaos engineering, performance and load testing etc.

• Serve as the QA authority in design reviews, production readiness assessments, and incident retrospectives(escaped defects).

• Collaborate with and devops engineers to refine monitoring, alerting, and debugging strategies for testing automation being run in CI/CD.

Quality Advocacy & Continuous Improvement

• Establish quality gates, release readiness metrics, and data driven feedback loops to ensure released software is production quality.
   

• Drive initiatives to integrate performance, security, and chaos testing into the development lifecycle.
   

• Advocate for a culture of quality across teams and influence architecture decisions with testing in mind.
   

Qualifications

Education

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
  
  Experience

• 10+ years in software testing or quality engineering roles, with 4+ years focused on Kubernetes, cloud-native applications, and distributed systems.

• Proven leadership experience in building and scaling test strategies in enterprise-grade environments.

Technical Proficiency

• Deep understanding of Kubernetes internals, cluster lifecycle management, Helm, service meshes (e.g., Istio or Linkerd), and network policies.

• Strong scripting and automation capabilities (Python, Pytest, Bash, etc.).

• Familiarity with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger), Kubernetes security (RBAC, secrets management), and performance benchmarking tools (e.g., K6).

• Solid grounding in cloud architecture (AWS, Azure, GCP), infrastructure provisioning, and containerized CI/CD.

• Moderate to advanced linux knowledge and proficiency is required: Bash scripting and debugging, systemd/logs, networking/firewalling/routing, certificate/PKI management, containers (Docker/containerd), and Kubernetes tooling (kubectl/Helm with OCI registries, GitOps/Flux) to install, test, and troubleshoot multi-cluster environme