Quality Engineer III

Pekin Insurance Careers•Pekin, IL

2d•$92,000 - $128,000•Hybrid

About The Position

You spend at least a third of your day at your job. You might as well spend it doing something you really love while working with a team you really enjoy being with, right? That’s the kind of atmosphere we offer at Pekin Insurance—fun, fast-paced, gratifying, supportive, and collaborative. Of course, it’s not all fun and games. Insurance is a serious business, and we pride ourselves on making people’s lives whole again after a major disaster or even a fender bender. It’s that sense of helping people that makes our team want to do our best every day. If you want to be excited about starting your workday and are ready to make a real difference in people’s lives, this could be the right spot for you. This is your opportunity to belong, thrive, and make a difference—right here at Pekin Insurance. Position Overview The Quality Engineer III works collaboratively with product, platform, and delivery teams to establish, govern, and continuously improve quality practices across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). This role ensures that quality is designed into solutions early, measured consistently, and validated through defined quality gates—rather than focusing on feature development or infrastructure implementation. The Quality Engineer III partners closely with Analysts, Product Owners, Developers, and QA teams to validate requirements clarity, BDD alignment, test coverage, and defect readiness. The role provides senior-level guidance on quality standards, and traceability, supporting delivery teams in translating business requirements into testable, measurable outcomes. Rather than writing application code, the Quality Engineer III evaluates and influences technical solutions to ensure they meet quality, stability, and performance expectations. Using Agile and DevOps-aligned delivery practices, the Quality Engineer III supports quality governance, metrics reporting, and release readiness, enabling faster and more predictable delivery without compromising quality. The role owns the operational execution of QE processes, including defect trend analysis, regression strategy alignment, and continuous improvement initiatives. The Quality Engineer III contributes to backlog refinement and planning activities by providing quality input, risk assessment, and readiness indicators, and participates in program increment planning, system demos, retrospectives, and inspect-and-adapt events to ensure quality outcomes are visible, measurable, and continuously improved.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in IT Engineering, Computer Science, Business Management, Mathematics, Information Technology, Computer Engineering, or Information Sciences preferred, or equivalent experience
Typically requires 5-8 years of experience in the desired field or may have advanced level technical or business work experience
In-depth ability to: Assess and support quality readiness and execution outcomes across multiple environments (cloud, on-premises, and test environments) to ensure environment readiness and stability
Evaluate application behavior and outcomes rather than develop UI or front-end solutions
Review and assess design artifacts (architecture, workflows, integrations) for quality, testability, and risk
Support quality validation across platforms (web, mobile, desktop) without owning feature development
Collaborate effectively with business and IT stakeholders to influence quality outcomes, resolve risks, and drive alignment
Apply sound judgment to identify quality risks, challenge readiness decisions, and escalate concerns when standards are not met
Apply analytical and innovative thinking to improve quality processes, metrics, and governance models
In-depth understanding of: How components throughout the technology stack interact, with a focus on failure points, dependencies, and quality risk
Application architectures and development patterns sufficient to assess quality, defects, and test coverage (not to author production code)
In-depth knowledge of: Agile and DevOps-aligned delivery models, including how quality gates integrate with CI/CD pipelines
Quality metrics and indicators (defect leakage, DRE, regression readiness, MTTR, change failure trends)
Test management, defect tracking, and traceability tools (e.g., Jira, Xray, Polarion or equivalent)
Databases and data integrity concepts as they relate to testing, validation, and defect analysis
Version control systems from a traceability and quality governance perspective
Architectural components and integration patterns, with emphasis on testability, reliability, and scalability
Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. without sponsorship now or in the future.

Nice To Haves

Experience in an agile environment strongly preferred

Responsibilities

Participates and plays an active role in Agile team activities, providing senior-level quality input and accountability to ensure solution increments meet defined quality standards and readiness criteria
Participates in release planning, readiness, and go/no-go events to assess quality risk and defect readiness
Owns the identification, assessment, and communication of quality risk, clearly articulating readiness concerns, trade-offs, and mitigation options to Product, Delivery, and Leadership to support informed release decisions
Works closely with product teams to validate requirements clarity, BDD alignment, and testability of features and user stories
Reviews design artifacts to assess quality, usability, and testability rather than performing visual customization or UX development
Evaluates solution designs for quality risks, dependencies, and gaps; provides recommendations to improve stability, scalability, and maintainability
Promotes reuse, flexibility, and efficiency through quality standards, patterns, and governance—not direct implementation
Applies quality-focused techniques (e.g., requirements reviews, journey validation, defect trend analysis) to improve overall user experience outcomes
Leads quality readiness activities across build, configuration, and test phases to ensure solutions meet acceptance and release criteria
Ensures delivered solutions meet quality, stability, and compliance standards prior to production deployment
Ensures traceability and integrity across requirements, BDD scenarios, test cases, defects, and releases
Contributes to end-to-end delivery workflows by identifying quality risks, gaps, and improvement opportunities across teams
Leads evaluation of existing applications and platforms from a quality and risk perspective, recommending improvements through metrics, analysis, and RCA
Partners with architecture and integration experts to assess quality impacts and align on quality standards and expectations
Guides teams to adhere to security and compliance requirements by validating controls through quality reviews and testing outcomes
Ensures escalated defects and quality issues are properly documented, triaged, and governed to resolution
Supports operational stability by ensuring break-fix activities follow quality standards and root-cause analysis is performed
Champions innovation in quality practices, metrics, and governance to improve delivery outcomes
Evaluates vendor-delivered work and services from a quality, compliance, and effectiveness perspective
Uses tooling and reporting to support quality metrics, governance workflows, and visibility (not primary automation or orchestration development)
Partners with automation and delivery teams to define automation strategy, coverage expectations, and regression readiness criteria without owning automation framework development
Performs other duties as assigned