If you're energized by solving complex systems challenges, excited to work alongside AI to amplify your impact, and motivated by the opportunity to shape what's next instead of simply maintaining what's been done before, you'll find your place here.
Join us to do the best work of your career and make a profound social impact as a Principal Software Engineer on our System Test Engineering Team in Chennai, India.
What you’ll achieve
As a Principal Software Engineer, you will validate and accelerate SONiC-based AI, data center, and enterprise networking releases across our network switch portfolio, including maintenance releases, hotfixes, and feature backports. As a successful candidate, you will be a technically savvy, passionate, and strongly self-driven engineer who drives the deliverables and objectives entrusted to you, your team, and scrums who works with engineering, architecture, and release teams to improve maintenance-release quality, automate quality gates, and deliver reliable software updates. Hiring at the Principal Software Engineer level or below, based on technical expertise, experience, and demonstrated impact.
You will
Develop focused validation strategies and test plans for maintenance releases, hotfixes, feature backports, customer-critical fixes, defect fixes, and architecture changes, translating specifications into test cases aligned with spec-driven and test-driven development (SDD/TDD).
Build Python and SpyTest automation that combines change-impact analysis, defect triage and verification, automated quality gates, and CI/CD-driven validation at scale, and AI agents that improve execution efficiency, impact, and value.
Validate release readiness across functional, interoperability, scale, performance, resiliency, and customer deployment scenarios.
Test RoCE and lossless Ethernet under congestion, including QoS, PFC, ECN, link-level retransmission, and retransmit behavior, and track link health (error counters, link flaps, FEC and CRC trends).
Analyze logs, telemetry, packet captures, and system behavior to identify root causes, close field escapes, and resolve complex issues, and continuously improve automation, quality signals, and release efficiency.
Take the first step towards your dream career
Every Dell Technologies team member brings something unique to the table. Here’s what we are looking for with this role:
Essential Requirements
System and release validation: experience in system testing, release validation, and end-to-end verification of AI, data center, or enterprise networking solutions, including troubleshooting complex scale-up, scale-across, scale-out, and rack-scale networking and compute deployments.
Networking technologies: VXLAN-EVPN, MLAG, EVPN-MH, ECMP, VRF, BGP, OSPF, IS-IS, SRv6, BFD, Layer 2 (VLAN, LACP, LLDP, STP), multicast (IGMP, PIM-SM, PIM-SSM, MLD), and enterprise services (DHCP, DNS, NTP, LDAP, RADIUS, TACACS+, 802.1X).
Lossless fabric validation: RoCE, QoS, DCB (PFC/ECN), lossless Ethernet, link-level retransmission, latency, and performance, including collective traffic on GPU clusters.
Automation and CI/CD: strong Python and test automation skills, with CI/CD validation pipelines, automated quality gates, scalable test frameworks, telemetry and northbound interfaces (CLI, REST, gNMI, NETCONF/YANG), and traffic generator testing (for example IXIA).
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Engineering in CSE, ECE, EEE, IT, Computer Networks, Cloud Computing, or equivalent.
Desirable Requirements
Hands-on SpyTest and network test automation, with experience in spec-driven or test-driven development (SDD/TDD), familiarity with server and storage environments, and software supply-chain practices (SBOM, CVE management).
Experience building or using AI agents and AI-assisted workflows (AI models and tools, for example Claude, Devin, GitHub Copilot) for test development, automation, defect analysis, and troubleshooting.
Application Closing Date: 30 November 2026
