Quality Assurance Engineer

Caterpillar Inc.•Irving, TX

4d•$112,710 - $183,140•Onsite

About The Position

Caterpillar is seeking a skilled Test Automation Engineer for its MineStar mining software solutions. MineStar connects machines and related systems to provide real-time guidance, tracking, monitoring, and supervisory control of mining fleets. The product is being modernized from a monolithic architecture to containerized microservices. This hands-on engineering role focuses on designing, building, and maintaining automated tests that run in CI, verify modernized services, and preserve legacy behavior within a self-managing delivery team. The position works onsite five days a week at Caterpillar’s Irving, Texas office and requires up to 10% travel. Domestic relocation assistance is available. The posted summary pay range is $112,710 to $183,140. Visa sponsorship information is inconsistent in the posting: one section says sponsorship is not available, while another says it is available for eligible applicants.

Requirements

Knowledge of the software development life cycle and structured approaches for delivering and managing software products.
Strong understanding of SDLC and Agile delivery, including shift-left testing, definition of done, and quality gates.
Experience applying shift-left practices, three-amigos conversations, and code reviews.
Experience with Cucumber or BDD frameworks, using BDD as a collaboration practice rather than merely adding Gherkin syntax to automation.
Collaborative approach to improving quality practices with engineering and product roles.
Strong communication skills for explaining quality status, automation coverage, and risk to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Experience mentoring team members in automated testing, framework ownership, and documentation.
Experience configuring and troubleshooting CI/CD pipelines, such as GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, or Jenkins.
Strong troubleshooting skills to investigate defects and automation failures to root cause, improve stability, and reduce flaky tests across environments and data sets.
Ability to monitor automated test runs, analyze failures, and drive quality improvements through root-cause identification and resolution.
Experience supporting test-environment readiness and test-data management in containerized platforms.
Proficiency in TypeScript, or strong JavaScript with the ability to ramp up in TypeScript; strong typed-language experience in Java, C#, or Python with type hints is also considered.
Ability to build and maintain test automation code and contribute to a Playwright and TypeScript framework.
Experience designing, implementing, and maintaining automated test suites that provide fast, reliable CI feedback.
Strong automated testing capability across API, business-flow, and end-to-end UI layers in modernized microservices architectures.
Hands-on REST API and contract testing, including positive and negative cases, error handling, response content and schema validation, and authorization/RBAC.
Experience authoring tests for REST and Protobuf endpoints and validating event side effects.
Strong business-flow test design, including cross-service behavior validation and parity checks between modernized and legacy solutions.
Ability to create outcome-based tests that remain maintainable through surface changes.
Strong test analysis and design, including risk-based and exploratory testing and translating requirements into clear, maintainable automated scenarios.

Nice To Haves

Protobuf or gRPC experience, using the schema as the source of truth for modernized services.
MQTT or event-driven testing experience, including validation of message-broker event side effects.
Kubernetes or containerized-platform testing, including reading logs across pod restarts and investigating mTLS, certificate, and RBAC failures.
Ability to read Java to support parity-test design against the legacy MineStar codebase; Java writing is not required.
Mining, industrial automation, or other safety-critical domain experience.
Performance and load-testing experience with tools such as k6, JMeter, or Gatling, including scenario design, baseline establishment, and latency and throughput analysis.
Ability to integrate performance checks into CI and flag regressions against agreed thresholds.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain automated tests across API, business-flow, and end-to-end UI layers for modernized MineStar microservices.
Author contract and operation tests for REST and Protobuf endpoints, covering positive, negative, boundary, error-handling, schema-validation, and MQTT event-side-effect scenarios.
Build business-flow API tests that exercise operations across services and compare modernized behavior with legacy behavior.
Automate AngularUI WebApp user journeys using Playwright, API-first setup, and role-based access-control permutations.
Contribute to the Playwright and TypeScript automation framework, including shared locators, Page Object Model, reusable fixtures, and parallel execution.
Configure and maintain GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines so tests run on pull requests; monitor executions, triage failures, and address flakiness at its root cause.
Write outcome-based, maintainable tests that are resilient to surface changes rather than tied to individual UI steps.
Support test-environment readiness and test-data management on the Kubernetes platform.
Partner with engineers through shift-left practices, three-amigos conversations, and code reviews to build quality early.
Hand completed per-domain automated suites to embedded scrum-team QAs, mentor them in maintaining and extending the suites, and document knowledge to reduce single points of failure.
Communicate quality status, automation coverage, and risk to technical and non-technical stakeholders.