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

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.

Location: Santa Clara, CA