Senior Staff Engineer

Life at Plume At Plume, we believe that technology isn't about moving faster, it's about making life’s moments better. Which is why we’ve built the world's first, and only, open and hardware-independent service delivery platform for smart homes, small businesses, enterprises, and beyond. Our SaaS platform uses WiFi, advanced AI, and machine learning to create the future of connected spaces—and human experiences—at massive scale. We now deliver services to over 60 million locations globally and have managed over 3 billion devices on our platform. We’re expanding rapidly, pioneering a new category, and we achieved our Series F funding in just four years. Our customers include many of the world's largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who look to Plume to help them evolve their smart home offerings while gleaning insights from their own data. With a bias for action and a love for being trailblazers, the team at Plume embodies a combination of relentless curiosity and imaginative innovation. We challenge ourselves to think in ways that other companies don't, work to do what should be done (rather than what can), and if we can’t do it exceptionally well, we don’t do it. It’s how we've assembled a team of world-class builders, thinkers, and doers. And it’s how we’re reinventing what’s possible every day. This is a work-from-office / In-Office role based in our Hyderabad, India location. What You Will Do: • Define and drive end-to-end QA and test strategies for core broadband, WiFi, and cloud-based solutions. • Lead testing across firmware, cloud services, APIs, microservices, and network components. • Design and execute comprehensive functional, integration, system, regression, performance, scalability, and reliability testing. • Develop and maintain automated test frameworks and test infrastructure to improve test coverage and release confidence. • Identify critical quality risks and establish appropriate test plans, quality gates, and release criteria. • Collaborate closely with software engineers, architects, product managers, and other QA teams to ensure quality throughout the development lifecycle. • Perform root-cause analysis of complex issues across distributed systems and drive defects to resolution. • Mentor QA engineers and contribute to engineering best practices, automation standards, and quality processes. • Provide technical leadership in improving testability, observability, CI/CD integration, and continuous quality engineering. • Participate in architecture and design discussions, proactively identifying potential quality and reliability risks. • Drive continuous improvements in test automation, defect prevention, test efficiency, and overall product quality. • Acts as a technical quality leader for the Core Engineering organization. • Operates with a high degree of ownership and independently drives complex, cross-functional quality initiatives. • Influences engineering teams to adopt a quality-by-design and automation-first mindset. • Mentors engineers and raises the overall technical capability of the QA organization. • Serves as a subject-matter expert for complex quality and reliability challenges. What We Are Looking For: • 12+ years of experience in Software Quality Engineering, with 5+ years leading QA for embedded systems, broadband, networking, WiFi, or cloud-based platforms. • Strong expertise in defining end-to-end test strategies across firmware, cloud services, APIs, microservices, and distributed systems. • Hands-on experience in test automation using Python, Java, C++, or similar languages, with modern automation frameworks. • Experience in functional, integration, regression, performance, scalability, and reliability testing. • Strong understanding of networking concepts, including TCP/IP, DHCP, DNS, IPv4/IPv6, WiFi, and broadband gateway architectures. • Experience with CI/CD pipelines, test automation infrastructure, and quality engineering best practices. • Strong debugging and root-cause analysis skills across firmware, cloud, and networking environments. • Proven ability to lead cross-functional quality initiatives, mentor engineers, and drive automation-first and quality-by-design practices. • Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills. Preferred: • Experience with broadband, WiFi, or CPE platforms. • Familiarity with RDK-B, OpenSync, PrplOS, Embedded Linux, or similar platforms. • Experience testing cloud-native applications, APIs, microservices, and containerized environments (Docker/Kubernetes). • Knowledge of Broadband Forum standards such as TR-069, TR-181, and TR-369 (USP). • Experience with performance, reliability, and security testing, along with observability tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, or ELK. • ISTQB or equivalent QA certification is a plus. Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience. About Plume As the creator of the only open, hardware-independent, cloud-controlled experience platform for ISPs and their subscribers, Plume partners with over 400 ISP customers, including some of the world’s largest such as Charter, Liberty Global, and J:COM. Using OpenSync, the most widely supported open-source, silicon-to-cloud framework for smart spaces, Plume’s software-defined network allows ISPs to decouple their service offerings from hardware and rapidly curate and deliver new services over a multi-vendor, open-platform architecture. Plume is an equal opportunity workplace that maintains a continuing policy of nondiscrimination in all employment practices and decisions, ensuring equal employment opportunities for all qualified individuals without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, national origin, age, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, pregnancy, childbirth or related individual conditions, medical conditions (as defined by state law), military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law.