Principal QA Engineer

The Role :

We are looking for a hands-on Principal QA Engineer to lead a team of quality engineers and own quality outcomes for assigned product areas.

The role will define risk-based QA strategies, establish the optimum test pyramid, and develop scalable test-data approaches for our multi-tenant SaaS platform.

This person will work closely with developers, product managers, architects, DevOps engineers, and other stakeholders throughout the product lifecycle.

The successful candidate must have strong experience developing and enhancing automation frameworks.

They will use this technical background to coach engineers, review automation solutions, remove technical barriers, and ensure every team member can contribute effectively to QA organization goals.

This is a combination of technical leadership, product-quality ownership, automation enablement, and people management.

What You Will Own :

Product Quality and Test Strategy :

- Own the QA strategy and quality outcomes for assigned product areas.

- Understand customer workflows, product requirements, integrations, architecture, and business risks.

- Define risk-based approaches covering functional, integration, regression, exploratory, performance, and reliability testing.

- Establish the optimum test pyramid across unit, component, API, contract, integration, UI, and end-to-end testing.

- Partner with developers to increase lower-level coverage and reduce dependence on brittle UI automation.

- Participate in requirements, technical-design, planning, and release-readiness discussions.

- Identify quality risks early and provide evidence-based release recommendations.

Multi-Tenant Test Data and Automation :

- Define a scalable test-data strategy for a multi-tenant SaaS platform.

- Ensure coverage across tenant configurations, entitlements, feature flags, roles, permissions, and customer workflows.

- Establish repeatable approaches for test-data creation, seeding, masking, refresh, and cleanup.

- Ensure test data supports reliable, parallel, and independently executable automated tests.

- Apply hands-on experience developing, enhancing, and maintaining automation frameworks.

- Establish coding standards, reusable patterns, code-review practices, and maintenance expectations.

- Review automation solutions and contribute to complex framework improvements when required.

- Troubleshoot issues involving automation, test data, environments, application dependencies, and pipelines.

CI/CD and Continuous Testing :

- Define the continuous-testing approach within CI/CD pipelines.

- Determine which test suites should run during pull requests, builds, deployments, and release validation.

- Optimize automation for fast feedback, parallel execution, stable results, and actionable reporting.

- Partner with development and DevOps teams to improve test-environment and test-data provisioning.

- Monitor pipeline failures and ensure flaky or consistently failing tests are investigated and resolved.

Leadership and Collaboration:

- Lead, manage, and develop a team of quality engineers.

- Set clear expectations for technical quality, product ownership, delivery, and accountability.

- Assess each engineers capabilities and establish individual technical-development plans.

- Coach engineers through pairing, code reviews, technical workshops, and hands-on problem solving.

- Ensure every team member understands the product, test strategy, test pyramid, test data, and automation framework.

- Work closely with product managers to understand customer needs, priorities, and acceptance criteria.

- Partner with developers to improve testability and build quality earlier in the development lifecycle.

- Communicate quality status, risks, and recommended actions clearly to technical and business stakeholders.

Continuous Improvement:

- Regularly evaluate the effectiveness of QA strategies, test pyramids, and automation coverage.

- Use production defects, customer feedback, and pipeline trends to identify improvement opportunities.

- Lead improvements across automation, test data, environments, CI/CD, and engineering practices.

- Track meaningful indicators such as escaped defects, critical-workflow coverage, automation stability, and feedback time.

- Evaluate new tools and AI-assisted testing approaches based on practical value and maintainability.

- Promote a culture of technical excellence, learning, ownership, and shared responsibility for quality.

What Success Looks Like:

A successful Principal QA Engineer will :

- Establish effective QA strategies and test pyramids for assigned products.

- Implement a scalable test-data strategy for multiple tenants and customer configurations.

- Improve automation stability and CI/CD feedback time.

- Reduce escaped defects and recurring production-quality issues.

- Demonstrate measurable technical growth across the QA team.

- Build strong quality ownership across product, development, and QA teams.

Required Qualifications:

- 1214 years of experience in Quality Engineering, QA Automation, or SDET roles within product-based organizations.

- Experience leading or managing QA automation engineers.

- Strong experience defining QA strategies and risk-based test approaches.

- Experience establishing test pyramids for complex SaaS products.

- Experience testing multi-tenant platforms and defining test-data strategies.

- Strong hands-on experience developing and maintaining automation frameworks.

- Strong programming skills in C#/.NET, Java, Python, or TypeScript.

- Experience with UI, API, integration, contract, database, and end-to-end automation.

- Experience with Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, Rest Assured, PyTest, TestNG, or similar tools.

- Strong understanding of microservices, distributed systems, and event-driven architectures.

- Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines.

- Experience with relational and NoSQL databases.

- Familiarity with Kubernetes, containers, and cloud environments.

- Strong coaching, product thinking, communication, and stakeholder-management skills.

Preferred Qualifications :

- Bachelors or masters degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field.

- Experience in healthcare, payments, financial technology, or regulated SaaS environments.

- Experience with Azure, Kafka, or Azure Service Bus.

- Experience with JMeter, k6, Locust, Grafana, or similar tools.

- Experience modernizing legacy automation suites.

- Experience using generative AI to improve testing and automation.

Why This Role Matters :

This role will ensure quality is built into product decisions, automation, test data, and delivery pipelinesnot treated only as a final testing activity.

The Principal QA Engineer will improve product reliability and release confidence while developing a technically capable QA team that can consistently achieve Alegeus quality goals.

Skills

SDET, Software Quality Assurance, Playwright Testing, Testing, Product Testing, API Testing, Test Strategy, Java, Python, Selenium