Sr. Engineer - Cloud SDET - Lightning

About the Role:

Lightning is a suite of services in the CrowdStrike cloud that expose sub-second, near-real-time APIs enabling Falcon Sensors to rapidly obtain threat information. Operating at massive scale, Lightning processes trillions of threat events daily within tight latency constraints — where performance and availability are critical to sensor operation and customer protection.

CrowdStrike is seeking a Senior Software Developer in Test (SDET) to enter our team as a bit of a hybrid contributor wearing hats for both the design and creation of custom test tooling, frameworks and systems, as well as for contributing to sub- and main branches of the core product code. In effect, you would ostensibly be the Sr backend developer who is also designated as test SME, validating key features and functionality that spans our processing, data and customer facing application layers to ensure it’s able to support low-latency prevention of malware, manage thousands of events per second, query across terabytes of data and deliver accurate information to the endpoint, ensuring it also processes the data properly. To that end, you will guide design discussions and code reviews with a focus on quality, serve as the team's SME for code hygiene, and contribute to service operations — all while continuously expanding test coverage and capabilities. Testing concerns span functional, performance, contract, and chaos/resilience engineering. Cybersecurity experience is a plus, not a prerequisite.

This is a team which prizes collaboration over competition and places high-trust in contributors. You’ll find you have high ownership and high schedule flexibility, as well as high trust placed in your expertise as the team’s dedicated SME, in the design and implementation of custom test architecture.

This role is hybrid, requiring 2-3 days per week on-site in one of the posted locations.

What You'll Do:

• Both build stuff and break stuff!
• Own end-to-end validation of Lightning services across cloud-side and Falcon Sensor interactions, spanning component, integration, and application levels, while continuously improving test and validation processes
• Build and own Lightning-specific test tooling and frameworks, while leveraging and contributing to shared organization-wide testing tools and infrastructure
• Define and drive testing strategies across functional, performance, contract, and chaos testing concerns
• Guide technical design reviews in quality SME capacity, to provide clear guidance on testability, quality, and code hygiene
• Leverage new open source solutions to build new tools that test things in new ways.
• Own code reviews with a focus on quality, serving as the team's SME for code hygiene
• Contribute to service operations, including improving overall service observability and monitoring, root cause analysis of production issues, and implementing quality improvements to prevent future outages

What You'll Need:

• 9+ years of experience (Avg. YoE: 11-16 years) as either/both an SDET or Backend Developer (combined)
• Experience building testing frameworks and tooling for a Cloud SaaS product or other SOA with similar cloud components
• Experience contributing to or defining testing strategy at a team or organizational level
• Strong debugging skills: ability to spot design flaws, race conditions, and performance bottlenecks in complex architectures
• Expertise in any of: Golang, Python, Java, Kotlin, Rust, or C/C++ — Go is our primary language, but strong engineers in any of these are welcome and we support ramp-up
• Experience in a cloud distributed systems stack: e.g. Kubernetes, Cassandra, Redis, Kafka, and/or similar technologies — you don't need all of these specifically, but transferable skills in each category are a must
• Experience with distributed systems and scalability challenges
• Experience with cloud services, such as AWS or GCP, particularly compute and storage offerings
• Proven experience utilizing AI technologies to enhance decision-making, streamline workflows and processes, improve efficiency and drive business outcomes.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and integrating automated testing into deployment workflows
• Experience developing and deploying in containerized environments (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes)
• Experience mentoring engineers and driving quality culture across a team or organization

Bonus Points:

• Experience building, operating, validating, and scaling low-latency cloud services using gRPC and event-driven messaging systems such as Kafka
• Experience building and shipping cloud-connected endpoint software
• Experience with at least one cloud environment, such as AWS, GCP, or OCI
• Experience leveraging AI and agentic tools to enhance testing workflows and automation