Job Description
Job Description
Job title: NIC Device Driver Test Engineer
Contract Role
Job type: Onsite
Location: San Jose, CA
Key Responsibilities
- Test Suite Architecture & Development: Design, develop, and execute a modern, component-level NIC driver test suite independent of monolithic AHV product testing.
- Kernel Compatibility Validation: Ensure NIC device drivers are compatible with past, current, and custom-configured LTS AHV Linux kernels (including upstream backports and modernized kmalloc() structures).
- Networking Stack Compatibility: Validate drivers against Linux networking enhancements, including the netdev subsystem, page_pool APIs, GRO/GSO improvements, packet steering, and interrupt balancing.
- Virtualization & Flow Networking Integration: Test for functionality, performance, and compatibility with standard Linux networking components utilized by Nutanix Flow, including Open vSwitch (OVS), iptables/nftables, and Linux routing.
- Enterprise Readiness & Stress Testing: Conduct rigorous load and stress testing to guarantee high reliability, performance, and health monitoring capability across varying NIC hardware families.
Core Technical Requirements
Domain Expertise: Extensive experience testing and validating Linux NIC device drivers in enterprise, hypervisor, or cloud environments.
Deep understanding of the Linux networking stack and netdev subsystem (e.g., modern Receive Side Scaling (RSS) configuration, Ethtool, and modern RX ring/queue management APIs).
Strong knowledge of Linux kernel internals, particularly regarding memory management (buffer ring allocations, memory leaks) and CPU affinity/pinning.
Specific Test Coverage Experience:
Data Integrity: Validating behavior across varying packet sizes and dynamic MTU setting changes (up to Jumbo Frames).
Interrupt & Core Scaling: Ensuring MSI/MSI-X interrupts and RSS distribute processing loads evenly across multiple CPU cores.
Hardware Offloads: Testing stateless offloads (TCP/UDP Checksum Offload, TSO, LRO) and Geneve Overlay Offloads essential for virtualized networking environments.
Performance Tools: Proficiency using open-source traffic generation and stress testing tools (e.g., iperf3, netperf) to validate line-rate throughput and identify failure modes.
Preferred Qualifications (Nice-to-Have)
Familiarity with industry-standard NIC certification testing, such as the Red Hat Hardware Certification Test Suite (redhat-certification) or VMware’s I/O Vendor Program (IOVP).
Experience in automated Python or Bash test framework development for component-level hardware testing.
Previous experience working directly with AHV, KVM, or similar hypervisors.
Understanding of backward and forward compatibility testing strategies for device drivers across hardware generations.