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

Illumina•San Diego, CA

12d•$141,600 - $212,400•Onsite

About The Position

Illumina is hiring a Senior Staff Engineer to set technical direction for quality engineering across enterprise platforms, including the use of AI agents for testing and the testing of AI agents themselves. This is the most senior individual contributor role in QA, responsible for test architecture, leadership of the Tricentis platform, and making agentic testing safe for regulated, GxP-relevant systems. The role provides technical leadership to 10–20 QA and automation engineers across vendors and teams. The position is part of Enterprise AI and partners with Data Engineering, application teams supporting SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday and Microsoft 365, and Quality & Regulatory. The role is based in San Diego, California, and is not remote. Its two core missions are using AI agents to test software faster and ensuring the organization’s AI agents can be trusted in production. The role covers enterprise test strategy, Tricentis platform architecture, agentic testing workflows, evaluation and release controls for AI agents, MCP integrations, CI/CD quality gates, and audit-ready quality evidence for regulated systems. The engineer will also mentor other engineers, establish engineering practices, report quality metrics, and advise on technical, vendor and adoption decisions. The estimated U.S. base salary range is $141,600–$212,400. Employees are eligible for a variable cash program, and eligible roles may receive equity. Benefits include access to genomics sequencing, family planning, health, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits, and paid time off.

Requirements

12 or more years of software quality engineering experience, including at least 5 years as a lead, principal or staff-level engineer setting strategy across multiple teams.
At least 5 years of hands-on enterprise-scale Tricentis Tosca experience, working knowledge of qTest, and experience with at least one of NeoLoad or SeaLights.
Demonstrated delivery of test automation for packaged enterprise applications; SAP S/4HANA or ECC and Salesforce experience is ideal.
At least 1 year building or operating LLM-based or agentic testing in production, beyond proof-of-concept work.
Strong coding skills 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 such as GxP, medical devices or SOX, 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.
Expert depth in Tosca and qTest and practical command of Tricentis agentic products.
Ability to design multi-agent QA workflows, connect agents and tools, and establish human oversight and stop conditions.
Ability to design AI evaluation and security checks, including golden datasets, scoring, tool-call checks, red teaming, guardrails and release gates.
Experience with modern test automation, API and contract testing, performance and reliability testing, security testing, accessibility, data and analytics testing, CI/CD, cloud and containers, observability, service virtualization, test data, and enterprise applications as relevant to the role.
Knowledge of FDA Computer Software Assurance and GAMP 5 Second Edition, including risk-based assurance.
Knowledge of 21 CFR Part 11 and EU Annex 11 requirements for electronic records, signatures and audit trails.
Ability to set technical direction and gain adoption without direct authority, make build/buy/partner decisions, and explain quality risk in business terms.

Nice To Haves

Tricentis certifications such as Tosca Architect, qTest or NeoLoad; ISTQB Advanced or Expert; or ISTQB Certified Tester AI Testing (CT-AI).
AWS Certified Machine Learning or AI Practitioner certification, or Databricks Generative AI Engineer certification.
Published MCP servers, evaluation suites or open-source test tooling.
Experience in life sciences, genomics, diagnostics or medical devices.
Experience leading a test effort for an SAP S/4HANA migration or RISE program.
Awareness of ISO 13485 and IEC 62304 for software touching medical device or diagnostic workflows.
Knowledge of FDA and EMA good AI practice principles, HIPAA, GDPR and data residency considerations for test data and AI prompts.

Responsibilities

Own enterprise test strategy, defining risk-based shift-left and shift-right practices across SAP S/4HANA, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, custom applications, data pipelines and AI agents.
Architect and lead the Tricentis platform, including Tosca, qTest, NeoLoad, SeaLights, LiveCompare and Tricentis AI Workspace; establish standards, reusable libraries, licensing and roadmap.
Design and operate multi-agent testing workflows that generate, execute, heal and triage tests, with human approval points and audit trails.
Create evaluation frameworks for AI agent releases, including golden datasets, LLM-as-judge scoring, red teaming, tool-call correctness, safety and cost checks.
Integrate Tricentis and internal MCP servers with Claude, GitHub Copilot, Cursor and Codex through the Enterprise AI gateway and policy.
Embed test impact analysis, quality gates and release risk scoring in CI/CD pipelines.
Partner with Quality & Regulatory to apply FDA CSA and GAMP 5 (2nd edition), producing Part 11-compliant evidence for automated and AI-assisted testing.
Mentor senior and staff engineers, run design reviews, write playbooks and lead the QA community of practice.
Own and report the quality scorecard, including escape rate, automation coverage, cycle time and cost per test.
Set multi-year technical direction and build, buy and partner strategies, and lead vendors and systems integrators toward a common quality standard.
Coach engineers in staff-level thinking and develop AI-fluent testers.
Explain quality risk to executives and recommend ship or hold decisions.