Senior Software Development Engineer in Test
NVIDIA Corporation · Santa Clara, CA
$168,000–$270,250from the description
Jul 1, 2026
Santa Clara, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior QA engineering role focused on testing and validating large-scale cloud infrastructure and data center services. Day-to-day work spans building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, leading cloud environment bring-ups, performance and reliability testing, and driving test automation — including with AI-assisted tooling. Suits an experienced engineer with deep hands-on background in Kubernetes, cluster management, and major cloud platforms.
Senior level · 8+ years · Santa Clara, CA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 30 people in the Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software quality assurance analysts and testers). range 7–55
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $170,192 (middle half $126,400–$188,281). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The role is titled 'Senior Test Developer / Test Engineer' and sits within an Enterprise Software QA team, but the day-to-day work is heavily weighted toward cloud infrastructure bring-up, CI/CD pipeline development, and cluster management — making it a genuine hybrid between QA (15-1253) and Software Developer (15-1252). 15-1253 was chosen as primary because the explicit framing is QA/test engineering with test plans, test automation, and quality ownership.
The degree requirement states 'Master's or Ph.D. … or equivalent experience.' Because equivalent experience is explicitly accepted, no formal degree is hard-gated.
The 8+ years requirement is stated for cluster management and related tools specifically; it is also the highest overall experience bar in the posting and is treated as the role-level minimum.
The 2+ years cloud platform requirement names AWS, Azure, Google, and OCI as interchangeable options; AWS is listed as the primary skill with the others in alternatives.
Monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, Thanos) are listed together under a 'Proficiency in' requirement in the required section; all four are marked as hard gates.
Selenium and Playwright appear under 'Ways to Stand Out from the Crowd' (the preferred/nice-to-have section) and are therefore not hard gates. Base Command Manager also appears in that section.
Location is not explicitly stated in the posting; NVIDIA's primary campus is Santa Clara, CA (San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara CBSA). The posting does not indicate remote eligibility.
Read the full posting
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