Senior Software Tester (contract)

<h3>Company Description</h3><p><strong>About Mirantis</strong></p><p>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.</p><p> </p><h3>Job Description</h3><p><strong>Key Responsibilities</strong></p><p><strong>Testing Strategy &amp; Leadership</strong></p><ul><li><p>Contribute to driving the overall QA strategy for Kubernetes and cloud-native environments, aligning quality goals with business objectives and release deadlines.</p></li><li><p>Evaluate and champion best-in-class testing best practices and frameworks for distributed systems.</p></li><li><p>Lead risk analysis and test planning for large-scale, multi-cloud infrastructure and container orchestration.<br/>  </p></li></ul><p><strong>Architecting Test Systems</strong></p><ul><li><p>Architect test frameworks and infrastructure for validating microservices and infrastructure components in multi-cluster and hybrid-cloud environments.</p></li><li><p>Oversee the design of complex test scenarios simulating production-like workloads, resource scaling, failure injection, and recovery across distributed clusters.</p></li></ul><p><strong>Automation &amp; Scalability</strong></p><ul><li><p>Spearhead the development of scalable and maintainable test automation integrated with CI/CD (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, etc.).</p></li><li><p>Leverage Kubernetes APIs, Helm, and service mesh tools to build comprehensive automation coverage, including system health, failover behavior, and network resilience.</p></li><li><p>Promote test infrastructure-as-code and drive IaC forward on the team making sure the infrastructure code is repeatable, extensible and reliable.<strong> </strong><br/>  </p></li></ul><p><strong>Mentorship &amp; Technical Influence</strong></p><ul><li><p>Mentor QA engineers and developers in advanced testing techniques such as: risk-based testing, chaos engineering, performance and load testing etc.</p></li><li><p>Serve as the QA authority in design reviews, production readiness assessments, and incident retrospectives(escaped defects).</p></li><li><p>Collaborate with and devops engineers to refine monitoring, alerting, and debugging strategies for testing automation being run in CI/CD.<br/>  </p></li></ul><p><strong>Quality Advocacy &amp; Continuous Improvement</strong></p><ul><li><p>Establish quality gates, release readiness metrics, and data driven feedback loops to ensure released software is production quality.</p></li><li><p>Drive initiatives to integrate performance, security, and chaos testing into the development lifecycle.</p></li><li><p>Advocate for a culture of quality across teams and influence architecture decisions with testing in mind.</p></li></ul><h3>Qualifications</h3><p><strong>Education</strong></p><ul><li><p>Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.</p></li></ul><p><strong>Experience</strong></p><ul><li><p>10+ years in software testing or quality engineering roles, with <strong>4+ years focused on Kubernetes, cloud-native applications, and distributed systems.</strong></p></li><li><p>Proven leadership experience in building and scaling test strategies in enterprise-grade environments.<br/>  </p></li></ul><p><strong>Technical Proficiency</strong></p><ul><li><p><strong>Deep understanding of Kubernetes </strong>internals, cluster lifecycle management, Helm, service meshes (e.g., Istio or Linkerd), and network policies.</p></li><li><p>Strong scripting and automation capabilities <strong>(Python, Pytest</strong>, Bash, etc.).</p></li><li><p>Familiarity with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger), Kubernetes security (RBAC, secrets management), and performance benchmarking tools (e.g., K6).</p></li><li><p>Solid grounding in cloud architecture (AWS, Azure, GCP), infrastructure provisioning, and containerized CI/CD.</p></li><li><p>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 environments.</p></li></ul><p><strong>Leadership &amp; Collab