Senior Staff Engineer, Quality Engineering (AI & Test Automation)

Position Summary

We are hiring a Senior Staff Engineer to set the technical direction for quality engineering across Illumina's enterprise platforms, with AI agents doing a growing share of the testing work. You will be the most senior individual contributor in QA: you design the test architecture, lead our Tricentis platform, and make agentic testing safe enough for regulated, GxP-relevant systems. Technical leadership of 10-20 QA and automation engineers across vendors and teams. The role sits in Enterprise AI and partners with Data Engineering, application teams (SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, M365) and Quality & Regulatory. It covers two equally important missions: using AI agents to test our software faster, and testing the AI agents we build so they can be trusted in production.

Responsibilities

• Own the enterprise test strategy. Define a risk-based, shift-left and shift-right strategy across SAP S/4HANA, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, custom apps, data pipelines and AI agents.
• Lead the Tricentis platform. Architect Tosca, qTest, NeoLoad, SeaLights, LiveCompare and Tricentis AI Workspace as one quality platform, including standards, reuse libraries, licensing and roadmap.
• Build agentic testing at scale. Design and run multi-agent test workflows that generate, execute, heal and triage tests, with clear human approval points and audit trails.
• Test our AI agents. Create the evaluation framework that gates every agent release: golden datasets, LLM-as-judge scoring, red teaming, tool-call correctness, safety and cost checks.
• Connect agents to tools through MCP. Integrate Tricentis remote MCP servers and our own MCP servers with Claude, GitHub Copilot, Cursor and Codex under the Enterprise AI gateway and policy.
• Embed quality in CI/CD. Make test impact analysis, quality gates and release risk scoring standard in every pipeline, so teams ship on evidence rather than gut feel.
• Deliver validated quality for GxP. Partner with Quality & Regulatory to apply FDA CSA and GAMP 5 (2nd ed.) so automated and AI-assisted testing produces Part 11 compliant evidence.
• Raise the bar for engineers. Mentor senior and staff engineers, run design reviews, write the playbooks, and lead the QA community of practice.
• Measure and report value. Own the quality scorecard (escape rate, automation coverage, cycle time, cost per test) and report it to engineering and business leaders.

Experience & Education

• 12+ years in software quality engineering, with 5+ years as a lead, principal or staff level engineer setting strategy across multiple teams.
• 5+ years of hands-on Tricentis Tosca experience at enterprise scale, plus working knowledge of qTest and at least one of NeoLoad or SeaLights.
• Proven delivery of test automation for packaged enterprise apps, ideally SAP S/4HANA or ECC and Salesforce.
• 1+ year building or operating LLM-based or agentic testing in production, not only proofs of concept.
• Strong coding in at least two of Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Java or C#.
• Deep CI/CD experience with GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, GitLab or Jenkins, including quality gates.
• Experience testing in regulated environments (GxP, medical device, SOX or similar) and producing audit-ready evidence.
• Clear written and spoken communication with engineers, product owners and executives.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Tricentis certifications (Tosca Architect, qTest, NeoLoad); ISTQB Advanced or Expert, or ISTQB Certified Tester AI Testing (CT-AI).
• AWS Certified Machine Learning or AI Practitioner, or Databricks Generative AI Engineer certification.
• Published MCP servers, eval suites or open source test tooling.
• Experience in life sciences, genomics, diagnostics or medical devices.
• Experience leading an SAP S/4HANA migration or RISE program test effort.