Senior Software QA Engineer

Ocient is a hyperscale data solutions company headquartered in Chicago, IL, enabling organizations to analyze trillions to quadrillions of data records in seconds. Over the past five years, Ocient has built a SQL compliant data warehouse for petabyte and beyond datasets that is 10x to 50x faster than competitive OLAP databases.

Position Overview:

You should be passionate about testing complex, large-scale distributed database systems with a focus on functional correctness, stress/scale and performance. You will validate new database features end‑to‑end—from test planning and execution to resource management—and share results that inform product direction. You will develop new workload generation, understand how they target performance and stress components of the database, and build infrastructure to measure key performance metrics, identifying bottlenecks or soft spots. You are highly collaborative, have strong communication skills, and can work independently to deliver well‑designed, meaningful test outcomes.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and execute comprehensive test plans and automated suites to validate new features/optimizations for the database as a system.
• Develop, run, and analyze regression tests targeting the system‑level database functionality—ensuring functional stability, scalability, and performance.
• Collaborate strongly with the Development team to implement tests onto nightly CI/QA infrastructure, improve existing test coverage and analysis tooling.
• Own end‑to‑end evaluation of Ocient's platform components, partnering across teams to identify behavioral/functional issues, correctness gaps, and opportunities for performance optimization.
• Provide technical leadership in defining test strategies, frameworks, and best practices for validating complex optimization and execution scenarios.
• Work cross‑functionally with engineering leadership and internal stakeholders to align on feature design goals, ensure test completeness, and drive timely resolution of issues.
• Lead the evolution of database testing infrastructure to support scalability, reliability, and reproducibility across functional and system‑level tests.
• Act as a subject matter expert for owned components, partnering with customer operations and development teams on escalated issues and validation.
• Mentor junior engineers, fostering expertise in database testing methodologies.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent.
• 4–6 years of experience in database development, administration, or QA engineering, ideally focused on testing and validating query processing behavior and database functionality.
• Deep understanding of relational and distributed database systems, with strong skills in SQL query design, execution, and analysis.
• Proven experience in test planning, designing, and executing automated, reliable test frameworks and workloads for databases.
• Strong QA and debugging skills with the ability to trace issues across query planning, execution, and component interactions within the database engine.
• Solid Linux expertise—comfortable monitoring resource utilization, analyzing logs, and understanding how system‑level factors influence database behavior.
• Proficiency in Python for test automation, diagnostics, and feature validation. Hands‑on experience with JIRA, test case management system and version control tools.
• Familiarity with cloud environments (AWS or GCP), including deployment and monitoring.
• Ability to analyze complex test results, interpret query execution behavior, and derive meaningful insights through visualization and test data analysis. Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to convey technical findings clearly to diverse audiences.

Ocient provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type and makes all hiring decisions without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

All official Ocient job postings and recruiting communications will come directly from our team via our Careers page, LinkedIn, or from an ocient.com email address. If you receive communication about a role from any other source, please treat it with caution and direct questions to [email protected].

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