Principal Software Development Engineer in Test

About the role

OVERVIEW

The Principal SDET will be a core member of the eClinical Solutions R&D Team. The Principal SDET will be primarily responsible for architecting and evolving automation frameworks and infrastructure, providing technical leadership, mentoring engineers, reviewing automation code quality, driving automation strategy, ensuring scalable and maintainable test automation solutions across the organization, and driving the initiative of migrating existing tests and infrastructure onto a new testing platform. In addition, the Principal SDET will collaborate closely with development, DevOps, architecture, and QA teams to establish best practices for automation, quality engineering, continuous testing, and system reliability. This position will report to the Senior Director, Software Quality Assurance.

KEY TASKS & RESPONSIBILITIES

- Designing and implementing AI-assisted workflows, copilots, or intelligent automation features

- Working with agentic AI patterns (e.g., task orchestration, tool-using agents, workflow automation)

- Applying prompt engineering, evaluation techniques, and guardrails to ensure reliability and compliance

- Collaborating with data and platform teams to operationalize AI—not just prototype it

- Design, develop, and maintain scalable enterprise-level test automation frameworks from scratch.

- Lead framework and infrastructure evolution initiatives as part of the global SQA automation team.

- Drive migration initiatives for existing automation frameworks, test suites, and infrastructure onto modern testing platforms.

- Provide technical leadership and mentorship to automation engineers and SDET teams.

- Hands-on experience in automating web-based applications using Playwright (PW) with C#/.NET.

- Strong experience in automating REST API testing, service validation, and integration testing.

- Experience validating database integrity, backend data consistency, and end-to-end data flows using SQL-based verification techniques.

- Drive Shift-Left testing practices by integrating automated quality validation early in the software development lifecycle.

- Design, build, and maintain ephemeral test environments for scalable and isolated automated testing workflows.

- Hands-on experience testing applications in ephemeral/containerized environments as part of CI/CD pipelines.

- Review and audit automation code for quality, maintainability, performance, and adherence to coding standards.

- Review automation execution reports and proactively follow up on discrepancies and failures.

- Train and mentor team members on framework usage, coding standards, automation best practices, and engineering principles.

- Drive adoption of Active Coding practices, clean code principles, and object-oriented programming (OOP) methodologies

- Collaborate with development teams, architects, DevOps engineers, and stakeholders to improve product quality and delivery efficiency.