Senior Staff Engineer, Quality Engineering (AI & Test Automation)

What if the work you did every day could impact the lives of people you know? Or all of humanity?

At Illumina, we are expanding access to genomic technology to realize health equity for billions of people around the world. Our efforts enable life-changing discoveries that are transforming human health through the early detection and diagnosis of diseases and new treatment options for patients.

Working at Illumina means being part of something bigger than yourself. Every person, in every role, has the opportunity to make a difference. Surrounded by extraordinary people, inspiring leaders, and world changing projects, you will do more and become more than you ever thought possible.

Location

San Diego, CA. Not remote.

Position Summary

We are hiring a Senior Staff Engineer to set the technical direction for quality engineering across Illumina's enterprise platforms, with AI agents doing a growing share of the testing work. You will be the most senior individual contributor in QA: you design the test architecture, lead our Tricentis platform, and make agentic testing safe enough for regulated, GxP-relevant systems. Technical leadership of 10-20 QA and automation engineers across vendors and teams.

The role sits in Enterprise AI and partners with Data Engineering, application teams (SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, M365) and Quality & Regulatory. It covers two equally important missions: using AI agents to test our software faster, and testing the AI agents we build so they can be trusted in production.

Responsibilities

• Own the enterprise test strategy. Define a risk-based, shift-left and shift-right strategy across SAP S/4HANA, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, custom apps, data pipelines and AI agents.

• Lead the Tricentis platform. Architect Tosca, qTest, NeoLoad, SeaLights, LiveCompare and Tricentis AI Workspace as one quality platform, including standards, reuse libraries, licensing and roadmap.

• Build agentic testing at scale. Design and run multi-agent test workflows that generate, execute, heal and triage tests, with clear human approval points and audit trails.

• Test our AI agents. Create the evaluation framework that gates every agent release: golden datasets, LLM-as-judge scoring, red teaming, tool-call correctness, safety and cost checks.

• Connect agents to tools through MCP. Integrate Tricentis remote MCP servers and our own MCP servers with Claude, GitHub Copilot, Cursor and Codex under the Enterprise AI gateway and policy.

• Embed quality in CI/CD. Make test impact analysis, quality gates and release risk scoring standard in every pipeline, so teams ship on evidence rather than gut feel.

• Deliver validated quality for GxP. Partner with Quality & Regulatory to apply FDA CSA and GAMP 5 (2nd ed.) so automated and AI-assisted testing produces Part 11 compliant evidence.

• Raise the bar for engineers. Mentor senior and staff engineers, run design reviews, write the playbooks, and lead the QA community of practice.

• Measure and report value. Own the quality scorecard (escape rate, automation coverage, cycle time, cost per test) and report it to engineering and business leaders.

Experience & Education

• 12+ years in software quality engineering, with 5+ years as a lead, principal or staff level engineer setting strategy across multiple teams.

• 5+ years of hands-on Tricentis Tosca experience at enterprise scale, plus working knowledge of qTest and at least one of NeoLoad or SeaLights.

• Proven delivery of test automation for packaged enterprise apps, ideally SAP S/4HANA or ECC and Salesforce.

• 1+ year building or operating LLM-based or agentic testing in production, not only proofs of concept.

• Strong coding in at least two of Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Java or C#.

• Deep CI/CD experience with GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, GitLab or Jenkins, including quality gates.

• Experience testing in regulated environments (GxP, medical device, SOX or similar) and producing audit-ready evidence.

• Clear written and spoken communication with engineers, product owners and executives.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Preferred qualifications

• Tricentis certifications (Tosca Architect, qTest, NeoLoad); ISTQB Advanced or Expert, or ISTQB Certified Tester AI Testing (CT-AI).

• AWS Certified Machine Learning or AI Practitioner, or Databricks Generative AI Engineer certification.

• Published MCP servers, eval suites or open source test tooling.

• Experience in life sciences, genomics, diagnostics or medical devices.

• Experience leading an SAP S/4HANA migration or RISE program test effort.

Tricentis platform skills

We expect expert depth in Tosca and qTest, and practical command of Tricentis's agentic products released in 2025 and 2026.

• Tosca (Commander, Cloud, Vision AI, model-based test automation): Architect module and test case design, reusable libraries, test data service, distributed execution and Tosca Cloud migration

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