Software Engineer — Test Automation

About the job

Company Description Arista Networks is an industry leader in data-driven, client-to-cloud networking for large data center, campus and routing environments. Arista is a well-established and profitable company with over $9 billion in revenue. Arista’s award-winning platforms, ranging in Ethernet speeds up to 800G bits per second, redefine scalability, agility, and resilience.  Arista is a founding member of the Ultra Ethernet consortium. We have shipped over 20 million cloud networking ports worldwide with CloudVision and EOS, an advanced network operating system. Arista is committed to open standards, and its products are available worldwide directly and through partners. At Arista, we value the diversity of thought and perspectives each employee brings. We believe fostering an inclusive environment where individuals from various backgrounds and experiences feel welcome is essential for driving creativity and innovation. Our commitment to excellence has earned us several prestigious awards, such as the Great Place to Work Survey for Best Engineering Team and Best Company for Diversity, Compensation, and Work-Life Balance. At Arista, we take pride in our track record of success and strive to maintain the highest quality and performance standards in everything we do.

Job Description Who You'll Work With  AGNI (Arista Guardian for Network Identity) is Arista's cloud-native SaaS platform for network access control and zero-trust security. It is deployed by enterprises worldwide, both as a managed cloud service and on-premises. The platform handles authentication and authorization for every device that joins a network — using protocols like 802.1X, RADIUS, EAP-TLS, TACACS+, and PKI — and must work correctly under real network conditions, at scale, every time.  The AGNI engineering team operates with a strong ownership culture: engineers define the feature, write the code, write the tests, and are accountable for what ships. The test automation team is a first-class engineering function — not a handoff at the end of development, but an integral part of how the team designs and validates the product.  You will work alongside backend engineers, network protocol specialists, and CloudOps/SRE to build and maintain the automated test infrastructure that validates the entire AGNI platform.  What You'll Do

- Design and build end-to-end automated test suites for AGNI features — authentication protocol flows, REST API correctness, network policy enforcement, and device onboarding — primarily in Go.

- Own test coverage for one or more product domains (e.g., RADIUS/EAP, TACACS+, captive portal, PKI) end to-end: derive test plans from feature specs, implement the cases, triage failures, and maintain them as the product evolves.

- Build and extend internal test utility libraries — simulated RADIUS/EAPOL clients, browser automation, certificate helpers, and REST API wrappers — and know when a gap in the utility layer is the right fix rather than working around it in the test.

- Drive root-cause analysis on test failures — distinguish a flaky test from a real product bug, reproduce the bug in a lab environment, and work with backend engineers to resolve it.

- Review feature design specifications and write test plans that cover happy paths, boundary conditions, and failure modes before the feature is implemented — shifting quality left, not bolting it on at the end.

- Own and improve the Jenkins CI pipelines that run nightly e2e suites against cloud and on-prem deployments: reduce flakiness, improve signal-to-noise, and shorten the feedback loop for engineers.

- Contribute targeted fixes to the platform codebase (testability improvements, log clarity, small bug fixes) when the test reveals a clear, bounded issue.

- Mentor junior engineers and interns on test design principles, debugging methodology, and the team's test framework.

- Participate in incident post-mortems and customer issue reviews — identify gaps in test coverage that allowed a bug to reach production and close them.

Qualifications - Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Electronics, or a related engineering field.

- 3–6 years of hands-on software engineering experience, with a significant portion in test automation or quality engineering — not just manual testing.

- Proficiency in Go or Python for writing production-grade automation code. Experience with Go is strongly preferred.

- Solid understanding of Linux from both an administration and debugging perspective: process management, networking tools (tcpdump, openssl, curl), and log analysis.

- Working knowledge of enterprise authentication protocols — 802.1X, RADIUS, EAP variants (EAP-TLS, PEAP, TEAP), TACACS+, or PKI/certificate management. You need to be able to read a packet trace and understand what went wrong.

- Hands-on experience with REST API testing — designing test cases, validating responses, and building reliable API clients in code.

- Experience with CI/CD systems (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or similar) — writing pipeline stages, triaging failures, and improving reliability.

- Strong debugging instinct: given a test failure and a log, you can form and test a hypothesis independently. Clear written communication — test plans, bug reports, and post-mortem write-ups that other engineers can act on without follow-up.  Good to have:

- Experience with containerization (Docker) and basic cloud environments (GCP/AWS).

- Familiarity with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana) — knowing which metrics to pull when a test exhibits unexpected behavior.

- Exposure to PKI infrastructure: certificate chains, SCEP/EST enrollment, TLS handshake failure modes. Experience with browser automation frameworks for UI/captive-portal test scenarios.

- Familiarity with database testing (PostgreSQL or equivalent) — validating that backend state changes are correctly persisted.

Additional Information Arista stands out as an engineering-centric company. Our leadership, including founders and engineering managers, are all engineers who understand sound software engineering principles and the importance of doing things right. We hire globally into our diverse team. At Arista, engineers have complete ownership of their projects. Our management structure is flat and streamlined, and software engineering is led by those who understand it best. We prioritize the development and utilization of test automation tools. Our engineers have access to every part of the company, providing opportunities to work across various domains. Arista is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with development offices in Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, and the US. We consider all our R&D centers equal in stature. Join us to shape the future of networking and be part of a culture that values invention, quality, respect, and fun.