Storage Benchmarking & Validation Engineer

Project

Work done for a product or program.

• Characterise steady-state versus fresh-out-of-box performance, latency distributions to the 99.999th percentile and performance consistency over time.
• Run power-loss and sudden-power-off resilience testing at scale with automated power-cycling equipment and verify data integrity after each cycle.
• Validate device behaviour under thermal throttling, altitude, vibration and sustained-load conditions representative of the deployment environment.
• Reproduce and triage customer-reported performance and stability issues, isolating whether the cause is firmware, controller, media or host.
• Validate security and management features including sanitize, TCG Opal, telemetry, SMART attributes and NVMe-MI out-of-band management.
• Own the validation exit criteria and signoff evidence for each product release gate.

Function

Work that keeps the discipline running: methods, tools, suppliers and people.

• Build and run performance benchmark suites using FIO, SNIA solid state storage performance methodology, SPEC and customer-specific workload traces.
• Execute protocol compliance and interoperability testing for NVMe, PCIe, SATA, UFS or DDR against reference platforms and analyzers.
• Develop and maintain automated validation frameworks, test racks and result databases with continuous-integration triggers on firmware builds.
• Benchmark competitor devices and publish internal comparative analysis to inform product positioning and engineering targets.

Project

1. Produce and hand over the role's key deliverables
   • Performance benchmark reports with steady-state and latency distribution data
   • Protocol compliance and interoperability test results
   • Power-loss resilience and data-integrity validation evidence
   • Automated validation framework and regression test suites
   • Competitive benchmarking analysis
   • Release-gate validation signoff package
2. Develop the test solutionGeneral
   • Define the test plan and coverage targets
   • Write and debug the test program
   • Design or specify the test hardware
3. Release to productionGeneral
   • Correlate results across testers and sites
   • Optimise test time
   • Release the program under change control

Function

1. Maintain test infrastructureGeneral
   • Keep program libraries and standards current
   • Plan tester and hardware capacity
2. Improve methodsGeneral
   • Review escapes and adjust coverage
   • Develop data analysis tools