The Principal Automation Engineer is accountable to lead the effort to research, design, document, and modify Automation specifications throughout the product development life cycle. The Principal Automation Engineer also defines and implements standards and processes for development, analysis, and maintenance of Automation framework in support of the business. The standards and process focus includes writing, coding, testing, and analyzing software programs and applications to maximize our ability to automate every use case at every step of software and customer interaction, ensuring best in class product quality. This role is a technical expert in automating for product quality and responsible for the technical health of automation in a product or project.

Essential Functions

• Lead research, identification, and analysis in order to fulfill automation framework design for new or existing software applications

• Identify risk and define mitigation plans, drive automation plans, and lead the effort in performing software use case and user interaction improvements and upgrades

• Define and implement test automation frameworks and methodologies that are scalable, maintainable, and reusable across multiple products and platforms

• Collaborate with other technical leaders to develop and maintain code quality and architecture standards.

• Drive the definition of automation development/framework plans, including scoping, estimates, and implementation

• Develop standards and reusable process for all automation engineering

• Provide technical advice, instruction, and training to automation engineers with less experience

• Advocate agile testing practices and implement best practices in our software environment

• Review specifications for testability, highlighting and proposing design consideration that will make a feature easier to test via automation, while expanding coverage and improving product quality

• Responsible for the development of source code and execution of automated test cases and QA processes that ensure quality throughout our release schedule

• Executes automation test strategy that promotes best automation approach, and development of toolset to reduce or eliminate manual test efforts for all products or projects

• Understands and contributes to the implementation of processes for Test Management and Reporting for Automated Suites

• Participate in code reviews and provide feedback to improve code quality and testability

• Drive continuous integration, recommending approach and technology infrastructure and tools

• Interface with development team to ensure sufficient test coverage upstream in unit testing in support of TDD best practices

• Mentor and train junior automation engineers on best practices and new technologies

• Stay up-to-date with emerging trends and technologies in test automation and apply them to improve the testing practices

Additional Functions

In addition to the essential functions listed above, the incumbent may perform the following additional functions.

• Participate in regulatory and compliance activities

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's in Computer Science, Information Systems, a related field or equivalent work experience
• 7+ years of experience in quality assurance/development
• Extensive experience in all aspects of automation and framework development
• Knowledge of database, cloud, and web technologies
• Comprehensive understanding of software test methodologies including white box, black box, functional, unit, feature, regression, integration, performance, and scalability
• Experience in building test automation scripts for cloud, web based or desktop applications
• Experience testing and automating secure REST APIs and mobile apps
• Experience integrating with release/build pipelines
• Proficiency in programming with multiple development technologies and ability to maintain software products written in different languages and platforms
• Extensive database (relational and hierarchical) and operating systems experience
• Extensive experience in driving an application architecture
• Experience using source code management system

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with product planning and developing business cases and return on investment analyses
• Proven experience as a test automation engineer in a product development environment
• Experience as a software engineer a plus
• Software as a medical device and/or dental industry experience
• Experience with Agile development methodologies and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices
• Experience in multi browser compatibility and cross platform testing
• Experience with test management tools such as JIRA, HP ALM, or similar

• Office environment – either in Patterson facility or at home/remote location
• Travel to corporate sites is periodically required (Quarterly or so)

On call rotations and available outside of normal business hours on evenings

The potential compensation range for this role is below. The final offer amount would be based on various factors such as candidate location (geographical labor market), experience, and skills. $91,300.00 - $115,200.00