Job Overview :

We are seeking a highly experienced Principal Test Engineer to lead our quality engineering strategy, drive test automation at scale, and ensure our products meet the highest standards of reliability, performance, and user experience.

As a principal-level leader, you will define the long-term testing vision, establish best practices, mentor teams, and work closely with engineering, product, and DevOps to embed quality deeply into every stage of the development lifecycle.

This role requires deep technical expertise, leadership in quality engineering, and the ability to architect complex testing solutions across diverse systems.

Key Responsibilities :

- Define and drive the overall test strategy, quality vision, and engineering roadmap for multiple product lines.

- Architect large-scale, scalable automated testing frameworks and test infrastructures for web, mobile, backend, and cloud systems.

- Evaluate and introduce modern testing tools, methodologies, and best practices to continuously improve quality metrics.

- Own the design and implementation of automation frameworks (UI, API, integration, performance).

- Ensure test automation coverage is robust, maintainable, and integrated into CI/CD workflows.

- Drive adoption of automation-first principles across engineering teams.

- Define detailed test plans, test strategies, acceptance criteria, and validation procedures for complex systems.

- Oversee functional, regression, integration, UAT, and exploratory testing for major releases.

- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure clarity of requirements, risk identification, and quality gates.

- Lead performance testing efforts including load, stress, endurance, and scalability tests.

- Work with security teams to validate vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, and threat modeling.

- Ensure systems adhere to high availability, reliability, and resilience benchmarks.

- Mentor QA engineers, SDETs, and automation engineers across multiple teams.

- Conduct code reviews, enforce quality standards, and guide engineers on test design and automation strategies.

- Act as a technical leader during defect triage, root-cause analysis, and incident reviews.

- Partner with Engineering Managers, Product Owners, Architects, and DevOps teams to deliver high-quality releases.

- Champion quality practices such as shift-left testing, CI/CD integration, and continuous quality monitoring.

- Influence and align testing processes with organizational goals and engineering standards.

- Define and track key quality metrics (defect leakage, automation coverage, reliability dashboards, MTTR).

- Establish continuous improvement programs to reduce defects, minimize flakiness, and enhance automation maturity.

- Provide executive-level reporting on test progress, risks, and quality status.

Required Skills & Qualifications :

Technical Expertise :

- 8+ years of experience in software testing, with significant experience in test automation and QA leadership.

- Expert-level proficiency in test automation frameworks (Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Appium, RestAssured, etc.

- Strong programming skills in Python, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, or similar languages.

- Deep understanding of CI/CD pipelines, build systems, and version control (Git, Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, etc.

- Expertise in testing API-based platforms, microservices, and distributed systems.

- Experience with performance testing tools (JMeter, Locust, k6, Gatling).

- Solid understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)