Principal Quality Engineer

Essential Functions

Design, architect, and build scalable automated test frameworks and suites (unit, integration, API, UI, end-to-end, and regression) for FreedomPay products.
Define and drive the test automation strategy, standards, and roadmap across engineering teams.
Leverage AI-enabled tools to accelerate testing and reduce time-to-market.
Analyze product requirements and designs to create test plans, test cases, and automation coverage that reflect risk, particularly for payment, security, and compliance workflows.
Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines with quality gates, reporting, and code coverage metrics.
Develop test tooling, simulators, and test data strategies for integrations with third-party services and payment terminal hardware.
Improve the performance, reliability, and maintainability of existing automation by reducing flaky tests and decreasing execution time.
Participate in and lead code reviews, design reviews, and technical discussions, influencing project teams to deliver high-quality software.
Mentor and coach quality engineers and software developers on test design, automation best practices, and testability.
Recommend and evaluate new technologies, including AI-assisted testing tools, to improve quality and productivity.
Contribute to project planning, estimation, and technical decision-making.
Protect company proprietary and confidential information.
Regularly attend team meetings to discuss projects, brainstorm ideas, and propose solutions to technical challenges.
Perform other duties as assigned.

Required Skills and Experience

BS/BA degree in Management Information Systems (MIS), Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
8+ years of experience in software quality engineering or software development, with a strong focus on test automation.
3+ years of experience in a senior, lead, or principal-level role responsible for automation strategy and architecture.
Strong programming experience in at least one object-oriented language, such as Java, C#, or Python.
Hands-on experience designing and building test automation frameworks from the ground up, not just maintaining existing frameworks.
Experience with UI and mobile test automation tools such as Selenium, Playwright, Appium, and Espresso.
Strong experience testing RESTful APIs that consume or provide JSON or XML.
Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines.
Demonstrated commitment to industry best practices in source control, software architecture, coding standards, and unit/system testing.
Familiarity with source control tools such as Git.
Strong troubleshooting and debugging skills, including root-cause analysis of complex distributed systems.
Ability to design, plan, and implement comprehensive test strategies based on product requirements.
Strong written and verbal English communication skills.
Excellent multitasking skills, with the ability to manage multiple initiatives simultaneously in a fast-paced environment.

Desired Skills and Experience

Experience testing payment systems, including EMV, point-to-point encryption (P2PE), POS/payment terminal hardware, printers, and other peripheral devices, including unattended or kiosk-mode solutions.
Experience communicating with external devices over socket or serial protocols (TCP/IP, USB, Bluetooth) for automated testing purposes.
Understanding of data security, encryption, PCI/EMV compliance, data privacy, and related regulations, including methods for validating compliance through testing.
Experience with performance, load, and security testing tools such as JMeter, k6, or Gatling.
Experience with Android and/or iOS mobile test automation.
Experience building test simulators, mocks, and service virtualization solutions for third-party and vendor integrations.
Experience with Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and tools such as Cucumber.
Experience working in Agile, Scrum, and Kanban environments.
Strong interest in engineering tooling and development processes, including continuous integration platforms such as Azure Pipelines, SonarQube, and code coverage tools.
Experience with test management and defect-tracking tools such as Azure DevOps and Jira.
Proficiency with AI-assisted development and testing tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) to accelerate coding, debugging, code reviews, and test authoring.
Experience mentoring engineers and influencing quality culture across multiple teams and disciplines.