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 be responsible for validating SONiC-based networking platforms for AI, data center, and enterprise environments, covering functional validation of hardware-software integration, optics and cable qualification, UDS (Uni-Dimensional Scale) and stress testing, and platform security. 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, working with platform, firmware, and hardware teams to solve complex hardware and system integration challenges and deliver reliable, secure, production-ready SONiC platforms across air-cooled and liquid-cooled deployments. Hiring at the Principal Software Engineer level or below, based on technical expertise, experience, and demonstrated impact.
You will
Drive board bring-up and platform qualification with ODM and OEM partners across BMC (Baseboard Management Controller) platforms, including Dell iDRAC (Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller)-based and non-iDRAC-based systems.
Validate optics, cables, transceivers, and sensors end to end, up to 1.6T: link bring-up, signal integrity, pre- and post-FEC (Forward Error Correction) errors, bit error rate (BER), and digital optical monitoring (DOM) readings.
Validate platform stability, performance, and reliability across air-cooled and direct liquid-cooled (DLC) architectures, including thermal, power, and operational readiness, UDS (Uni-Dimensional Scale), stress, longevity, failover, recovery, and fault injection.
Validate platform security through threat modeling, vulnerability assessment and CVE remediation validation, secure boot, PFR (Platform Firmware Resilience), firmware and image integrity validation, security scans, and platform hardening.
Develop test plans and cases aligned with spec-driven and test-driven development (SDD/TDD), Python and SpyTest automation, and AI agents that improve execution efficiency, impact, and value, and analyze logs, telemetry, diagnostics, and packet captures to close field escapes through triage and closure.
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
Platform functional knowledge: functional understanding of platform features and their behavior, UDS (Uni-Dimensional Scale) validation, board bring-up, and hardware diagnostics across scale-up, scale-across, and scale-out systems, air-cooled and DLC-based platforms, with working knowledge of BIOS/UEFI, CPLD (complex programmable logic device), switch ASIC and SerDes, I2C/SMBus, power, thermal, and BMC-based management.
Optics and cabling: validation of optics, cables, and transceivers, including DAC (direct-attach copper), AOC (active optical cable), QSFP-DD and OSFP up to 1.6T, DOM, and BER analysis.
Platform automation: strong Python and test automation skills, with SpyTest, CI/CD, traffic generator testing (for example IXIA), packet analysis, and telemetry and northbound interfaces (CLI, REST, gNMI, NETCONF/YANG, Redfish).
Platform networking, compute, and security: Layer 2/3, BGP, VXLAN-EVPN, ECMP, QoS, RoCE, high availability, and rack-level compute integration, plus secure boot, PFR (Platform Firmware Resilience), image integrity, and vulnerability management.
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Engineering in CSE, ECE, EEE, IT, Computer Networks, Cloud Computing, or equivalent.
Desirable Requirements
Hands-on SONiC and SpyTest experience, spec-driven or test-driven development (SDD/TDD), and exposure to security scanning and network analysis tools, for example OpenSCAP, Nessus, Qualys, Trivy, OpenVAS, Lynis, and Nmap.
Experience building or using AI agents and AI-assisted workflows (AI models and tools, for example Claude, Devin, GitHub Copilot) for test development, automation, analysis, and troubleshooting, and exposure to emerging scale-up fabric standards (for example UALink and Ultra Ethernet).
Application Closing Date: 30 November 2026
