Quality Assurance Engineer

Caterpillar Inc.•Irving, TX

5d•$112,710 - $183,140•Onsite

About The Position

Caterpillar Inc. is seeking a skilled and experienced Test Automation Engineer to join their multi-disciplinary delivery teams building world-class mining software solutions. As MineStar is modernized from a long-standing monolith into containerized microservices, this role focuses on test automation and technical testing: designing, building, and maintaining automated test suites that prove modernized services behave correctly and preserve legacy behavior. This is a hands-on engineering role, writing tests that run in CI and catch real defects, embedded within a high performing, self-managing delivery team.

Requirements

Knowledge of software development life cycle; ability to use a structured methodology for delivering and managing new or enhanced software products to the marketplace.
Strong understanding of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and Agile delivery, embedding quality early through shift-left testing, definition of done, and quality gates.
Experience applying shift-left practices, three-amigos conversations, and code reviews to build quality throughout the development lifecycle.
Experience with Cucumber or BDD frameworks where BDD is used as a collaboration practice (three-amigos), not Gherkin syntax layered over automation.
Collaborative approach, partnering with engineers and product roles to continuously improve quality practices and outcomes.
Strong communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate quality status, automation coverage, and risk to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Experience mentoring team members on automated testing practices, framework ownership, and documentation to promote long-term sustainability and knowledge sharing.
Knowledge of technical troubleshooting approaches, tools and techniques; ability to anticipate, recognize, and resolve technical issues on hardware, software, application or operation.
Experience configuring and troubleshooting CI/CD pipelines, including GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, or Jenkins.
Strong troubleshooting skills to triage defects and automation failures to root cause, improving stability and reducing flaky tests across environments and data sets.
Ability to monitor automated test execution, analyze failures, and drive quality improvements through root cause identification and resolution.
Experience supporting test environment readiness and test data management within containerized platforms.
Knowledge of relevant programming languages and tools; ability to test, write, design, debug, troubleshoot and maintain source codes and computer programs.
Proficiency in TypeScript, or strong JavaScript with a credible TypeScript ramp, and the ability to build and maintain test automation code (strong typed-language depth in Java, C#, or Python with type hints also considered).
Automate end-to-end user journeys through the AngularUI WebApp using Playwright, with API-first test setup and role-based access control (RBAC) permutations.
Contribute to and evolve the Playwright and TypeScript automation framework, including the shared locator library, extendable Page Object Model, reusable fixtures, and parallel execution.
Knowledge of software product testing; ability to design, plan, and execute testing strategies and tactics to ensure software product quality and adherence to stated requirements.
Experience designing, implementing, and maintaining automated test suites that provide fast, reliable feedback in CI.
Strong capability in automated testing across API, business-flow, and end-to-end UI layers for modernized microservices architectures.
Hands-on experience testing REST APIs and contracts, including positive and negative scenarios, error handling, response content and schema validation, and authorization / role-based access control (RBAC).
Experience authoring contract and operation tests against REST and Protobuf endpoints, covering happy paths, negative and boundary cases, error handling, response schema validation, and event side-effects.
Strong business-flow test design skills, including validating system behavior across services and performing parity checks between modernized and legacy solutions.
Outcome-based test design, with the ability to write maintainable tests that survive surface changes.
Strong test analysis and design capability, including risk-based and exploratory testing, and translating requirements into clear, maintainable automated scenarios.

Nice To Haves

Protobuf or gRPC experience, used as the schema source of truth for modernized services.
MQTT or event-driven testing, validating event side-effects published via the message broker.
Kubernetes or containerized platform testing, including reading logs across pod restarts and reasoning about mTLS, certificate, and RBAC failures.
Java reading literacy to support parity test design against the legacy MineStar codebase (writing Java not required).
Mining, industrial automation, or other safety-critical domain background.
Performance and load testing experience (e.g. k6, JMeter, or Gatling), including designing scenarios, establishing baselines, and interpreting latency and throughput results.
Ability to integrate performance checks into CI and flag regressions against agreed thresholds, complementing functional automation.

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 against REST and Protobuf endpoints, covering happy paths, negative and boundary cases, error handling, response schema validation, and event (MQTT) side-effects.
Build business-flow API tests that stitch operations across services to prove the system behaves correctly, including parity checks that compare modernized and legacy behavior.
Automate end-to-end user journeys through the AngularUI WebApp using Playwright, with API-first test setup and role-based access control (RBAC) permutations.
Contribute to and evolve the Playwright and TypeScript automation framework, including the shared locator library, extendable Page Object Model, reusable fixtures, and parallel execution.
Configure and maintain CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions) so automated tests run on every pull request, monitoring daily execution, triaging failures, and driving down flakiness to root cause.
Write outcome-based, maintainable tests that survive surface changes, rather than step-coupled scripts tied to a single UI.
Support test environment readiness and test data management for automation on the containerized (Kubernetes) platform.
Partner with engineers through shift-left practices, three-amigos conversations, and code reviews to build quality in early.
Hand finished per-domain automated suites to embedded scrum-team QAs, mentoring them to own and extend the suites and actively removing single points of failure through documentation.
Communicate quality status, automation coverage, and risk clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.