We are seeking a Staff QA Engineer to provide technical leadership for Quality Engineering across the DDN Horizon Control, including Horizon Control & Horizon Store. This is a senior individual contributor role responsible for defining test strategy, designing automation frameworks, developing comprehensive validation solutions, and driving release quality for a distributed cloud-native system built with Go, Kubernetes, NATS, PostgreSQL, REST APIs, and event-driven workflows. You will work closely with software engineers, architects, product management, DevOps, and program teams to ensure Horizon Control delivers enterprise-grade reliability, scalability, security, and usability. The ideal candidate will be equally comfortable performing exploratory testing, developing automated test frameworks, validating distributed system behavior, troubleshooting complex failures, and driving quality improvements throughout the software development lifecycle. This role requires strong expertise in both manual and automated testing. You will be expected to contribute hands-on to test design, automation development, system validation, troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and release readiness while influencing engineering decisions through technical leadership. The ideal candidate is passionate about building quality into the product from the design phase, has experience validating distributed systems at scale, and enjoys solving complex technical challenges across APIs, microservices, event-driven architectures, Kubernetes environments, and AI infrastructure platforms.