Software Quality Engineer, Secure Firewall

The application window is expected to close on: 10/01/2026 This position is open to candidates in Fulton, MD or Austin, TX. Meet the Team Cisco’s Network Security System and Integration Test (SIT) and System Test (ST) teams ensure the quality, reliability, and scalability of our Secure Firewall solutions, serving as a vital line of defense for our enterprise customers. Your Impact As a Software Quality Engineer, you will independently own assigned test areas and validate complex, end-to-end customer workflows across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. You will combine hands-on system testing, automation, network-security expertise, and disciplined defect investigation to identify integration and regression risks before release. You will work closely with software development, platform, automation, product, and release teams throughout the development lifecycle. This role requires strong technical judgment, execution ownership, and clear communication of product-quality risks. In this role, you will: Develop and execute risk-based test plans for Cisco Secure Firewall products and their management, data-plane, platform, and ecosystem integrations. Validate end-to-end workflows across firewall management, threat inspection, routing, switching, NAT, VPN, identity, logging, policy deployment, and related security capabilities. Test complex deployment topologies, including standalone, high-availability, clustered, multi-instance, virtualized, and cloud-based environments. Perform feature integration, system, regression, upgrade, rollback, backward-compatibility, resiliency, recovery, scale, stress, and longevity testing. Design, implement, maintain, and troubleshoot automated tests using Python-based frameworks and supporting tools. Build, configure, and maintain representative test environments containing network devices, security appliances, traffic generators, virtual machines, and cloud resources. Reproduce, isolate, and characterize complex software and system failures using packet captures, logs, traces, core files, system metrics, and diagnostic tools. Document defects with clear reproduction procedures, technical evidence, business impact, and severity justification. Participate in feature handoffs, technical reviews, test-plan reviews, defect triage, and cross-functional quality reviews. Use AI-assisted engineering and testing tools where appropriate to accelerate test design, failure analysis, and automation development while validating outputs and protecting confidential information. Minimum Qualifications Bachelor’s degree + 5 years of experience in software quality engineering, system testing, network engineering, or a related discipline. Experience designing test scenarios, selecting appropriate methodologies, and configuring the required test environments. Experience using Python or a comparable scripting language for test automation and tooling. Experience with Linux or Unix administration and troubleshooting skills. Experience leveraging generative AI assistants across the software development lifecycle to accelerate coding, automate testing, and streamline work item management. Preferred Qualifications Experience testing network-security products such as firewalls, intrusion prevention or detection systems, secure gateways, or comparable security platforms. Strong knowledge of TCP/IP and network troubleshooting. Practical experience with: Layer 2 and Layer 3 networking LANs, link aggregation, and interface configurations Static and dynamic routing, including OSPF and BGP IPv4 and IPv6 NAT and access-control policies Site-to-site and remote-access VPN technologies High availability, failover, clustering, or redundant systems Experience using packet-analysis and diagnostic tools such as Wireshark, tcpdump, system logs, debuggers, or equivalent utilities. Strong written and verbal communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively across geographically distributed teams. Ability to investigate complex failures across multiple interacting components and communicate findings clearly. Experience with Cisco Secure Firewall, including FTD, FMC, ASA, FXOS, Snort, or related technologies. Experience with Python test frameworks such as pyATS, pytest, or comparable automation platforms. Familiarity with REST APIs, Git-based development workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and automated test execution systems. Experience validating upgrades, rollback, backward compatibility, configuration migration, and long-running production-like workloads. Experience with performance, scale, stress, soak, resiliency, or fault-injection testing. Familiarity with virtualization and cloud platforms such as VMware, KVM, AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Experience with traffic-generation, protocol-simulation, or network-performance tools. Knowledge of security threats, traffic inspection, identity integration, telemetry, logging, and observability. Cisco networking or security certification, such as CCNP Enterprise or CCNP Security. Why Cisco?  At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint. Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere.  We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.  Message to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/