SASE Firewall QA Automation Engineer

The role

You will build and maintain automated tests to validate a next-generation firewall and cybersecurity platform. This includes automating functional, regression, and performance testing across security domains like SASE, ZTNA, and SD-WAN.

What you will do

• Develop and maintain automated test suites for firewall functionality
• Build and maintain test topologies and lab environments using VMs, containers, and physical appliances
• Generate and shape realistic network traffic to exercise the firewall data plane
• Run test suites in CI and triage failures
• File clear, reproducible defect reports with packet captures and logs
• Contribute to test plans and test-case design from requirements
• Support performance and scale testing
• Work with developers to improve testability
• Stay current with automation tooling including AI-assisted test generation

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
• Strong automation scripting ability in Python and Bash
• Comfort working in Ubuntu or other Linux environments from the command line
• Day-to-day use of Git
• Working knowledge of networking protocols and traffic flows including 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 including iptables, nftables, conntrack, and iproute2
• Proficient in analyzing logs and network captures using 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
• Experience running automated tests in CI/CD pipelines

Nice to have

• Experience with traffic generation, shaping, and impairment tools such as iperf3, Scapy, hping3, tc/netem, TRex, or Spirent or Ixia
• Contributions to open-source security or networking projects
• Exposure to firewall security testing including IPS/IDS signature validation, TLS/SSL inspection, URL filtering, and threat-feed verification
• Familiarity with virtualization and container tooling such as Docker, Docker Compose, VMware, KVM, or Kubernetes
• Familiarity 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
• 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
• Experience validating firewall logging and telemetry such as syslog, NetFlow, or IPFIX export

About the company

NETGEAR is on a mission to unleash the full potential of connectivity with intelligent solutions that delight and protect. They turn ideas into innovative networking products that connect people, power businesses, and advance the way we live.