Protolabs

Online-quoted digital manufacturing for prototyping

Senior Software Quality Engineer

Test Automation EngineeringUpdated on Nov 13

Full-timeMaple Plain, MN, USA

About the Job

Requirements

A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
At least 7 years of experience in software quality assurance, test automation, or software development engineer in test (SDET) roles in a software-as-a-service or production environment.
Experience owning test automation and continuous-integration integration for backend or platform teams.
A proven track record of leading test strategy or automation initiatives across cross-functional products.
Strong programming skills for test automation, especially in Python, with C# as a plus, and comfort working directly in engineering codebases, including reviews, fixes, shared libraries, and build pipelines.
Solid experience with application programming interface (API) and user-interface testing, component integration, and service-level integration testing.
Hands-on experience designing and maintaining GitHub Actions or similar continuous-integration pipelines, including parallel jobs, artifacts, secrets management, branch protections, and failure triage.
A good understanding of databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL, including writing data setup and assertions, understanding migration impacts, ensuring test isolation, and writing complex structured query language (SQL) queries.
Experience working in cloud environments such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or Microsoft Azure, and familiarity with containerized workloads including Docker and basic Kubernetes concepts for test environments.
ISTQB certification at foundation or advanced level, or equivalent formal quality assurance training, with practical application of structured test design techniques such as equivalence partitioning, boundary value analysis, risk-based testing, traceability, and quality modeling.
Ability to translate finance, sales, and business rules into clear test cases and automation in ambiguous domains.
Attention to detail, especially around pricing rules and regression in revenue-impacting flows.
Only U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, refugees, or asylees are eligible for hire; individuals with temporary visas are ineligible.

Responsibilities

Support and evolve the test strategy for the Pricing domain, covering functional, integration, contract, regression, and non-functional testing such as performance, reliability, and machine-learning quality gating across services and APIs.
Design, implement, and maintain automated test suites for APIs, events, integrations, and targeted end-to-end and performance scenarios aligned with the team’s architecture, including API and event-driven components and cloud deployments.
Own and extend continuous testing within GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps continuous-integration and continuous-delivery pipelines, ensuring test execution on pull requests, enforcing quality gates, reporting results, managing flaky tests, and integrating with deployment workflows.
Validate pricing and machine-learning outputs for correctness, edge cases, and regression, including geometry-driven estimates, probabilistic forecasts, and model-serving behavior where applicable.
Partner with engineers to improve testability through clear acceptance criteria, observable systems, contract testing between services, and shift-left practices during code reviews.
Investigate defects in production and pre-production environments, perform root-cause analysis, and drive preventative improvements such as closing automation gaps, increasing coverage, and enhancing processes.
Contribute to release readiness by assessing risks, defining regression scope, providing go/no-go input, and verifying system behavior after release for pricing-critical changes.
Monitor quality metrics including coverage trends, defect escape rates, pipeline stability, and service-level-agreement-related signals, communicate status to engineering and product leadership, and automate post-release monitoring.
Mentor quality assurance engineers and software development engineers in test, promote testing standards, establish coding conventions for tests, and drive shared ownership of quality and testing frameworks across the engineering organization.
Participate in on-call or incident-support rotations when needed, focusing on reproductions, adding automated regression coverage, and ensuring long-term fixes.
Ensure the test approach aligns with relevant regulatory, audit, and data-handling requirements, especially for commercial pricing systems.

Desired Qualifications

Exposure to machine-learning and MLOps testing, including model validation, A/B testing or backtesting support, monitoring inference pipelines, and ensuring data quality.
Experience with tools such as pytest, Playwright or similar tools for selective user-interface and API flows, Postman or Newman, contract-testing frameworks, and performance tools such as Locust.
Familiarity with observability practices including logs, metrics, and traces for test-failure diagnosis and production-like verification.
Experience participating in on-call or incident response within a platform team.
Experience with DBT or data-testing frameworks.

Salary Range: 114300 to 171500 (Currency: USD) (Pay period: per-year-salary)

Be yourself at Protolabs

Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification.  We are an equal opportunity employer, and we are committed to building a diverse team that feels they are valued in the workplace.  So do you feel you do not meet every single requirement but still intrigued? We encourage you to still apply!  You can help make our company even better.  We do not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, age, mental or physical ability, or any way you represent yourself.  We strongly believe diversity makes for more successful teams.

Why Protolabs?

We are the leaders in digital manufacturing. We hire doers, makers, and creative thinkers who tackle our roles with an entrepreneurial spirit. Our culture is centered around meaningful work that brings new and innovative products to market at unprecedented speeds. We are a diverse team that comes from all walks of life and take pride in our team who is smart, genuine, humble, and passionate about what we do. It’s our people who fuel our creativity and make our culture feel like home.

Join our team as a

Senior Software Quality Engineer!

This is a HYBRID role - onsite Tuesday-Thursday in Maple Plain, MN.

We are seeking a Senior Software Quality Engineer to help our agile engineering team deliver reliable enterprise web applications and APIs. This is a hands-on senior individual-contributor role for an engineer who combines strong test-automation skills with a practical, risk-based approach to quality. A primary focus of this role is building dependable automated testing into CI/CD pipelines so the team receives fast feedback and can release with confidence.

You will work closely with software engineers, product managers, business analysts, and architects throughout the development lifecycle. Rather than acting as a final quality gate, you will help the team build quality into design, implementation, delivery, and production operations. You will influence testability, develop maintainable automation primarily in C#/.NET and Python, own the continuous-testing approach within CI/CD, and provide clear evidence about product and release risk.

What you’ll do

Support and evolve the test strategy for the Pricing domain, covering functional, integration, contract, regression, and non‑functional testing such as performance, reliability, and ML quality gating across services and APIs

Design, implement, and maintain automated test suites for APIs, events, integrations, and targeted end‑to‑end and performance scenarios aligned with the team’s architecture, including API and event‑driven components and cloud deployments

Own and extend continuous testing within GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines, ensuring test execution on PRs, enforcing quality gates, reporting results, managing flaky tests, and integrating with deployment workflows.

Validate pricing and ML outputs for correctness, edge cases, and regression, including geometry‑driven estimates, probabilistic forecasts, and model‑serving behaviour where applicable

Partner with engineers to improve testability through clear acceptance criteria, observable systems, contract testing between services, and shift‑left practices during code reviews. Investigate defects in production and pre‑production environments, perform root cause analysis, and drive preventative improvements such as closing automation gaps, increasing coverage, and enhancing processes

Contribute to release readiness by assessing risks, defining regression scope, providing go or no‑go input, and verifying system behaviour after release for pricing‑critical changes

Monitor quality metrics including coverage trends, defect escape rates, pipeline stability, and SLA‑related signals, and communicate status clearly to engineering and product leadership while automating post‑release monitoring

Mentor QA engineers and SDETs, promote testing standards, establish coding conventions for tests, and drive shared ownership of quality and testing frameworks across the engineering organisation. Participate in on‑call or incident support rotations when needed, focusing on reproductions, adding automated regression coverage, and ensuring long‑term fixes

Ensure the test approach aligns with relevant regulatory, audit, and data handling requirements, especially in the context of commercial pricing systems

What you’ll bring

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
7+ years of experience in software quality assurance, test automation, or SDET roles in a SaaS or production environment
Experience owning test automation and CI integration for backend or platform teams
Proven track record of leading test strategy or automation initiatives across cross functional products
Strong programming skills for test automation, especially in Python, with C# as a plus, and comfortable working directly in engineering codebases including reviews, fixes, shared libraries, and build pipelines
Solid experience with API and UI testing, along with component integration and service level integration testing
Hands on experience designing and maintaining GitHub Actions or similar CI pipelines, including parallel jobs, artefacts, secrets management, branch protections, and failure triage
Good understanding of databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL, including writing data setup and assertions, understanding migration impacts, ensuring test isolation, and writing complex SQL queries
Experience working in cloud environments such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, and familiarity with containerised workloads including
Docker and basic Kubernetes concepts for test environments
ISTQB certification at foundation or advanced level, or equivalent formal QA training, with practical application of structured test design techniques such as equivalence partitioning, boundary value analysis, risk based testing, traceability, and quality modelling
Strong analytical skills when working in ambiguous domains, with the ability to translate finance, sales, and business rules into clear test cases and automation
A strong quality mindset with attention to detail, especially around pricing rules and regression in revenue impacting flows

Nice to have

Exposure to ML and MLOps testing, including model validation, A B or backtesting support, monitoring inference pipelines, and ensuring data quality
Experience with tools such as pytest, Playwright or similar for selective UI and API flows, Postman or Newman, contract testing frameworks, and performance tools like Locust
Familiarity with observability practices including logs, metrics, and traces for test failure diagnosis and production like verification
Experience participating in on call or incident response within a platform team
Experience with DBT or data testing frameworks

What's in it for you?

We offer a competitive salary and annual bonus opportunity
In addition, we offer amazing benefits including but not limited to:
Health Insurance: Traditional OR High Deductible plan
Flexible Spending Accounts
Health Savings Account (including employer contributions)
Dental and Vision
Basic and Supplemental Life Insurance
Short-Term and Long-Term Disability
Paid caregiver leave
You will receive PTO + Holiday Pay + Wellness Hours + Volunteer Hours
401k with company match and immediate vest
Employee Stock Purchase Program at a 15% discounted rate
Matching grants through Protolabs foundation
And More!

Proto Labs maintains ITAR-compliant operations in all of our United States based facilities. Due to ITAR regulations, this role is only open to U.S. Citizens, lawful permanent residents (green card holders) or foreign nationals granted refugee or asylee status. Individuals with temporary visas (e.g. E, F-1, H-1, H-2, L, B, J, TN or OPT) are not eligible for hire in this role.

Proto Labs, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer

Physical Demands:

While performing the essential duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit; use a computer keyboard, monitor and mouse, telephone and printer; reach with hands, and arms, talk, see and hear. The employee is occasionally required to stand, walk, stoop or kneel and must occasionally lift and/or move up to 25 pounds.

Work Environment:

Indoors (A/C); nonsmoking; the majority of this job function is performed in an office setting requiring normal safety precautions. However, there may be job duties that require the employee to spend time in the manufacturing areas exposed to machinery and noise; eye protection occasionally required. Occasionally works in outside weather conditions. Occasionally works near moving mechanical parts and in high, precarious places and is occasionally exposed to wet and/or humid conditions, fumes or airborne particles, toxic or caustic chemicals, risk of electrical shock and vibration. The noise level in the work environment is usually quiet to moderate.

About the Company

Protolabs

Online-quoted digital manufacturing for prototyping

Protolabs delivers digital manufacturing services for rapid prototyping and low-volume production. Its core offerings include 3D printing, CNC machining, and injection molding, all accessible through an online quoting system that provides free design analysis within hours. The company leverages a global network of more than 250 vetted manufacturing partners to provide fast, scalable production with consistent quality. Unlike traditional shops, Protolabs combines an automated, online workflow with a large partner network to quickly move a concept from design to production, aiming to reduce development time and total costs. The goal is to help engineers, designers, and product developers bring ideas to market faster by pairing speed, cost efficiency, and responsive customer service with broad manufacturing capabilities.

Company size: 1,001-5,000
Company stage: IPO
Headquarters: Maple Plain, MN
Founded: 1999

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