QA & Release Engineer

About this role

MariaDB is making a big impact on the world. Whether you’re checking your bank account, buying a coffee, shopping online, making a phone call, listening to music, taking out a loan, or ordering takeout – MariaDB is the backbone of applications used every day. Companies small and large, including 75% of the Fortune 500 run MariaDB, touching the lives of billions of people. With massive reach through Linux distributions, enterprise deployments, and public clouds, MariaDB is uniquely positioned as the leading database for modern application development.

The Opportunity

MariaDB MaxScale is a database proxy that manages traffic between applications and MariaDB server clusters. It functions as an intermediary layer to provide high availability, scalability, and load balancing. Because applications connect to MaxScale as if it were a MariaDB server, complex operations—such as read-write splitting, query limiting, and transparent failover—can be implemented without modifying the application.

Role Overview
We are looking for an engineer to join the MaxScale team to primarily focus on QA and release management and secondarily on the maintenance of our build infrastructure. MaxScale consists of multiple configurable components, resulting in a high number of potential configurations that require extensive test coverage. While our developers write system tests in a white-box fashion, this role focuses on black-box testing of complex scenarios, the verification of product documentation, and the management of our packaging and release pipelines.

As MaxScale and its tests are written in C++, a good working knowledge of the language is expected, along with a solid understanding of SQL. In addition to testing, you will work closely with support engineers and customers to verify and resolve reported problems, and assist in maintaining the automated build system.

Key Responsibilities
QA & Technical Investigation
● Black-Box Testing: Design and execute tests for complex scenarios to ensure various combinations of MaxScale filters and routers work correctly together.
● Documentation Verification: Review and verify that product documentation is accurate, exhaustive, and reflects the actual behavior of the software.
● Customer Issue Verification: Act as a technical point of contact for issues escalated by support engineers. You will interact with support and occasionally customers to verify problems, build reproduction environments, and isolate root causes.
● Problem Resolution: Create representative test cases to assist the development team in resolving bugs. You may also contribute code fixes as you become more familiar with the MaxScale codebase.

Build & Release Engineering
● Release Management: Coordinate four maintenance releases per year across five active MaxScale series, ensuring all builds and packages are verified and ready for release on schedule.
● Build Infrastructure: Monitor and maintain the automated build system. You will troubleshoot build failures across various platforms and manage dependencies within virtual machine environments.
● Packaging: Manage and troubleshoot the creation of DEB and RPM packages for various Linux distributions.
● Infrastructure Development: Gain proficiency in our BuildBot environment (written in Python) to independently implement modifications and improvements to the MaxScale build pipeline.

Experience and Qualifications
Required Skills
● Programming: A good working knowledge of C++ for test development and understanding the code base. Proficiency in Python is required for build automation and scripting.
● Database Knowledge: Strong SQL knowledge and experience with database management systems, preferably MariaDB or MySQL.
● Linux Systems: Experience with Linux environments, including proficiency in DEB and RPM packaging and repository management.
● CI/CD: Practical experience with Jenkins/GitLab/etc.
● Testing & Analysis: Experience in black-box testing and troubleshooting complex software interactions.
● Virtualization and Cloud: Experience using Virtual Machines and cloud platforms for building and testing software.

Preferred Qualifications
● Strong background specifically with MariaDB architecture.
● Hands-on experience with BuildBot (our primary CI tool).

Candidate Profile
● Analytical: You are capable of the technical work required to reproduce bugs or diagnose build and packaging failures across different platforms.
● Detail-Oriented: You have a disciplined approach to verifying that documentation matches software…