The posting
Role Overview
NETGEAR is looking for a QA Automation Engineer to help validate our next-generation firewall and cybersecurity platform. In this role, you will build and maintain automated tests that verify firewall behavior across critical security domains including Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Secure Web Gateways (SWG), Virtual Private Networks (VPN), and Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN).
Working alongside firewall developers and senior QA engineers, you will automate functional, regression, and performance testing against real and simulated network traffic. You will not be expected to know every area of the stack on day one — we will support you in growing across it.
Key Responsibilities:
- Develop and maintain automated test suites that validate firewall functionality — policy and rule evaluation, NAT, stateful session handling, and traffic filtering across NGFW, SASE, ZTNA, SWG, VPN, and SD-WAN features.
- Build and maintain test topologies and lab environments, including virtual machines, containers, and physical firewall appliances.
- Generate and shape realistic network traffic to exercise the firewall data plane, and verify observed behavior against expected policy outcomes.
- Run test suites in CI, triage failures, distinguish product defects from environment and test issues, and file clear, reproducible defect reports with supporting packet captures and logs.
- Contribute to test plans and test-case design from firewall requirements, and help keep automation coverage mapped to those test cases.
- Support performance and scale testing — throughput, connections per second, and concurrent sessions — and help identify regressions.
- Work with developers to improve testability, and stay current with automation tooling, including AI-assisted test generation, maintenance, and failure triage.
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Required Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
- 2–4 years of professional experience in QA automation or test engineering, preferably for networking or security products.
- Strong automation scripting ability in Python and Bash, comfort working in Ubuntu or other Linux environments from the command line, and day-to-day use of Git.
- Working knowledge of networking protocols and traffic flows — TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/HTTPS, TLS/SSL, NAT, and routing fundamentals.
- Understanding of firewall fundamentals such as packet filtering, stateful connection tracking, NAT, and rule and policy evaluation.
- Hands-on experience with Linux networking and firewall tooling — iptables and nftables rule configuration, conntrack for session inspection, and iproute2 (ip addr, ip route, network namespaces, bridges, VLANs) for building and inspecting test topologies.
- Proficient in analyzing logs and network captures using tools such as Wireshark, tshark, and tcpdump.
- Experience with a test framework and runner such as pytest or Robot Framework.
- Experience with REST API testing using Postman, REST Assured, or scripted HTTP clients, for validating firewall management and policy APIs.
- Experience running automated tests in CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI).
- Familiarity with defect tracking and test management tools (e.g., Jira, TestRail, Xray), and good communication skills in an agile, cross-functional team.
Preferred Qualifications (optional):
- Experience with traffic generation, shaping, and impairment tools such as iperf3, Scapy, hping3, tc/netem, TRex, or commercial testers like Spirent or Ixia.
- Contributions to open-source security or networking projects.
- Exposure to firewall security testing — IPS/IDS signature validation, TLS/SSL inspection, URL filtering, and threat-feed verification.
- Familiarity with virtualization and container tooling for building test labs — Docker and Docker Compose, VMware or KVM, Kubernetes — and with infrastructure-as-code such as Ansible or Terraform.
- Exposure to performance and scale testing, and to high-availability and failover validation.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted and agentic testing tools — for example LLM-assisted test generation, self-healing test maintenance, or agent-based exploratory testing — and an interest in applying them to network security test suites.
- Experience automating network devices and appliances over SSH and CLI using libraries such as Paramiko or Netmiko.
- Familiarity with certificate and PKI tooling such as OpenSSL, for generating test certificates and validating TLS/SSL inspection behavior.
- Experience validating firewall logging and telemetry — syslog, NetFlow, or IPFIX export — against expected policy events.
Company Statement
At NETGEAR, we are on a mission to unleash the full potential of connectivity with intelligent solutions that delight and protect. We turn ideas into innovative networking products that connect people, power businesses, and advance the way we live.
We're a performance-driven, talented and connected team that's committed to delivering world-class products for our customers. As a company, we value our employees as the most essential building blocks of our success. And as teammates, we commit to taking our work to the Next Gear by living our values: we Dare to Transform the future, Connect and Delight our customers, Communicate Courageously with each other and collaborate to Win It Together. You’ll find our values woven through our processes, present in our decisions, and celebrated throughout our culture.
We strive to attract top talent and create a great workplace where people feel engaged, inspired, challenged, proud and respected. If you are creative, forward-thinking, passionate about technology and are looking for a rewarding career to make an impact, then you've got what it takes to succeed at NETGEAR. Join our network and help us shape the future of connectivity.
NETGEAR hires based on merit. All qualified applicants will receive equal consideration for employment. All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.
