Principal Quality Engineer

Key Responsibilities
Test Design and Strategy:

- Designs scalable strategies for complex systems that align with quality goals of the function and product vision.

- Recommends approaches based on risk to inform architecture and tooling initiatives.

- Defines coverage across systems to account for technical unknowns, scalability, and integration complexity.

Test Execution:

- Oversees team test environment setup and maintenance across multiple teams, ensuring scalability.

- Adapts validation plans for complex systems through risk modeling to address service ownership alignment.

- Creates documentation for failures across components, implementing corrections where needed

- Prioritizes risk-based regression to balance speed, risk, and automation coverage across products or services.

Defect Tracking and Management:

- Takes ownership of reproducing customer issues, performing root cause analysis, and verifying fixes.

- Manages defects across features.

- Leads regular reporting on test progress/defects, ensures root causes are addressed through fixes and engineering accountability.

- Independently conducts post-incident (post-mortem) reviews to identify root causes and recommend preventative actions.

- Independently drafts findings and action plans for leadership review.

- Partners with others on troubleshooting and performing root cause analysis to uncover recurring quality issues and drive improvements.

Collaboration and Communication:

- Supports cross-functional quality initiatives by contributing to technical roadmap alignment, surfacing quality risks, and collaborating with partner teams to drive test alignment.

- Works with product management and developers to align on areas for testing.

- Influences the design and prioritizes testing and tooling.

- Maintains and optimizes test infrastructure, driving efficiency and scalability to improve automation and test processes.

Continuous Improvement:

- Analyzes and updates processes that improve consistency and reduce friction in engineering workflows within a limited, clearly scoped area.

Automation:

- Drives team-level quality improvements by identifying process gaps and contributing to local transformation efforts.

- Develops scalable automation solutions that support test coverage and reuse within a product or team.

- Promotes automation best practices by resolving complex issues and guiding peers on test maintainability.

- Integrates automation into Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines by contributing to workflow enhancements and reliability improvements.

Risk Assessment:

- Leads quality risk assessments during product development, ensuring proactive risk mitigation and testing strategies.

- Identifies systematic impacts of test coverage on moderately complex features areas.

- Implements and enforces software quality gates at key development stages by evaluating test coverage, static analysis results, and defect metrics to ensure release readiness.

- Leads the review and refinement of test plans across product areas, identifying high-risk impact areas and working with Scrum teams to prioritize mitigation and validate coverage.

Test Tooling:

- Maintains and optimizes test infrastructure to drive improvements.

- Provides input into "build versus buy" decisions to increase efficiency and scalability.

Additional Responsibilities (as needed)
Performance Testing:

- Leads testing of complex non-functional requirements across services, focusing on multi-user performance, dynamic scalability, and stress conditions.

- Coordinates with performance and teams to integrate advanced tooling, profiling, and remediation strategies.

- Integrates user experience metrics into performance benchmarks to drive product-level responsiveness standards.

Core Responsibilities
Planning & Execution:

- Manages and coordinates moderately complex tasks, monitoring timelines and deliverables to ensure timely completion and adherence to requirements for a moderately-sized project or initiative. Efficiently delegates, monitors, and prioritizes work across multiple projects, providing technical oversight and adjusting plans to address shifts in resources or timelines.

Collaboration & Partnership:

- Collaborates across the organization to align on expectations and achieve shared objectives.

- Leverages understanding of business leaders, stakeholders, and/or customers to ensure proposed solutions meet their needs.

- Supports inclusivity by actively seeking and listening to diverse perspectives, ensuring others feel heard and respected.

Problem Solving:

- Identifies and addresses moderately complex issues by analyzing a wide range of data and/or information to identify solutions in accordance with standard practices.

- Proactively escalates unresolved or critical issues with a thorough assessment and suggests potential solutions.

- Reviews, contributes to, and documents problem solving strategies.

Continuous Learning:

- Pursues learning opportunities to expand knowledge and skills and/or tools in new areas and stays abreast of the latest industry trends and best practices.

- Proactively seeks and leverages ongoing feedback and training to improve skills.

- Coaches and mentors junior team members, fostering continuous learning and knowledge sharing within and across teams.

Continuous Improvement:

- Develops ideas, recommends updates, and/or collaborates on the implementation of process improvements to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of processes, protocols, and workflows across teams, and evaluates the impact on key stakeholders.

- Solicits feedback from others on ideas for alternative approaches and methods for continued improvement.

Performance and Development:

- Contributes to the talent development pipeline by participating in candidate interviews, assessing candidates, and providing hiring recommendations.