Principal Quality Assurance Engineer

Deltek is seeking a Principal Quality Assurance Engineer who brings deep ERP and accounting domain expertise to ensure the correctness, reliability, and real-world fidelity of our Startpoint platform.

This is not a traditional testing role — the primary value is domain authority, not test execution. You will act as the customer proxy, owning end-to-end correctness of the ERP system and elevating quality thinking across the entire engineering organization.

The ideal candidate thinks like a real user navigating complex accounting workflows, surfaces issues that engineering wouldn't anticipate, and partners with Product and Engineering as a domain authority who can validate that the system behaves correctly for real-world ERP scenarios.

If you have a deep background in accounting or ERP systems, can reason across full business workflows, and want to own quality from first principles rather than execute scripts, we invite you to join our team.

Responsibilities: • Own end-to-end correctness of ERP workflows in Startpoint — from data entry to financial output — ensuring GAAP compliance and real-world fidelity.

• Act as the domain authority and customer proxy, validating complex ERP scenarios that go beyond feature behavior: purchase order variations, billing workflows, payroll runs, multi-entity financials.

• Identify gaps between specification and reality, feeding actionable improvements back to Product and Engineering.

• Evaluate full-flow scenarios — not just UI or API behavior — including dataset correctness, cross-feature interactions, and data migration fidelity.

• Serve as the quality catalyst for the team: raise the bar on quality thinking, help level up engineers and testers, and define what good looks like for ERP correctness.

• Build and maintain a deep knowledge base of system behavior that can evolve into support readiness and product validation authority.

• Collaborate with Product Managers, Engineers, and QE leads to define quality requirements grounded in real customer usage patterns and ensure they are consistently met.

• Analyze defect trends, patterns, and root causes to identify systemic quality issues and drive improvements across the product.

• Analyze fleet usage data to pinpoint future investment opportunities. Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Accounting, Finance, Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field.

• Professional accounting qualification (CPA, ACCA, or equivalent) is a strong differentiator.

• Relevant certifications in software quality or ERP systems are advantageous.

Experience:

• 8+ years of experience working with ERP systems — as a practitioner, implementer, consultant, or quality engineer with deep domain knowledge.

• Proven expertise in at least two of: Project Accounting, Financial Accounting, Accounts Payable/Receivable, Payroll, Time & Expense, Purchasing, or Inventory.

• Experience validating complex, real-world business scenarios end-to-end — not just feature-level test cases.

• Track record of identifying systemic quality gaps and driving improvements at the process and engineering level.

• Experience working in Agile/Sprint environments with globally distributed teams.

• Prior experience with Ajera, Costpoint, Vantagepoint, or comparable AEC/GovCon ERP systems is highly desirable. Technical Qualifications:

• Deep understanding of ERP data models, accounting transaction flows, and financial reporting logic.

• Ability to write SQL queries for data validation and scenario verification — comfortable working directly with database outputs.

• Familiarity with API testing concepts and tools (e.g., Postman) to validate system integrations.

• Ability to interpret and validate data migration results for schema comparison and record fidelity. • Familiarity with AI-assisted testing concepts or willingness to work within an AI native QE pipeline is a plus.

• Basic understanding of version control (Git) and issue tracking (ADO/TFS or equivalent).

Soft Skills:

• Exceptional domain reasoning — can think through a complex accounting scenario from first principles, not just pattern-match to test scripts.

• Strong communication skills: able to articulate correctness concerns clearly to engineers, PMs, and leadership.

• Customer-zero mindset: naturally simulates real user behavior and surfaces the issues a real customer would encounter.

• Proactive and self-directed — identifies what needs validating without being told.

• High ownership mentality: comfortable being the sole domain authority on ERP correctness in a fast-moving product team.

• Collaborative and constructive: elevates others quality thinking rather than policing defects.