Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) — Enterprise Technology Services

Apple•Austin, TX

About The Position

Join Apple’s Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization as a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) within the IS&T Enterprise Business Application group. This role is crucial for Apple's Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) transformation initiative, focusing on delivering a next-generation Product Information Management (PIM) platform. You will collaborate closely with business stakeholders and engineering teams to build an enterprise PIM platform that supports innovation and collaboration across Apple's product value chain. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience with large-scale, on-premise and cloud-based enterprise solutions, particularly PLM, and possess sound technical and functional knowledge of PLM domains and modern test frameworks. This position fosters a collaborative environment that values autonomy, transparency, innovation, and learning.

Requirements

Minimum of 5 years of professional experience in quality assurance or software engineering.
Proficient in developing test plans and automation strategies for intricate full-stack applications.
Experience testing and automating browser-based applications across platforms using Playwright (TypeScript), Selenium, or equivalent.
Experience testing and automating enterprise applications such as Siemens Teamcenter or an equivalent PLM system.
Hands-on experience automating and testing asynchronous and distributed systems.
Strong programming ability in TypeScript, including typed interfaces and generics, async/await, clean code practices, code review, and Git-based workflows.
Experience with API and contract testing (REST/SOAP, JSON/XML) using Playwright's API request client, Postman/Insomnia, or equivalent, including JSON Schema validation.
Working knowledge of SQL for test data setup and backend verification.
Experience integrating automated test suites into a CI/CD pipeline.

Nice To Haves

Depth in the Playwright Test ecosystem, including custom fixtures, projects and sharding, network interception, trace viewer, visual comparison, and component testing.
Extensive knowledge of back-end development technologies, particularly Java and related frameworks (Spring/Spring Boot, microservices).
Working knowledge of browser technologies and frameworks such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and React, including the DOM and accessibility semantics.
Proficiency in relational database technologies such as Oracle or Postgres.
Depth in Siemens Teamcenter, including Active Workspace, BMIDE data model, SOA/ITK services, workflows, and Teamcenter Integration Framework (TcIF).
Experience with PLM data migration and cutover validation, including extract, transform, load, and reconciliation at scale.
Experience with message brokers and streaming platforms (Kafka via kafkajs, JMS/ActiveMQ) and with ETL or data pipeline testing.
Experience with performance and resilience testing of enterprise workloads.
Familiarity with test management and defect tracking practices, including requirement-to-test traceability and Allure-based reporting.
Self-motivated, proactive, and meticulous individual with excellent written and oral English communication skills.

Responsibilities

Partner with engineering, infrastructure, site reliability, program management, and partner technical and business teams to formulate engineering specifications and testable acceptance criteria.
Participate in design and architecture reviews as the quality advocate, identifying testability gaps, missing observability, and risky integration points.
Act as the quality advocate in agile ceremonies, refining stories into verifiable behaviors, estimating test effort, and upholding the team's definition of done.
Craft test plans, test cases, and associated automation for complex full-stack PLM workflows, setting standards, estimating effort, and coordinating execution across various testing cycles.
Own the automation architecture in TypeScript, building and maintaining a reusable, data-driven UI and API test framework on Playwright Test, including custom fixtures, page- and service-object layering, shared typed clients, parallel sharded execution, and ensuring no flaky tests.
Treat test code as production code, adhering to strict TypeScript configuration, linting, formatting, generating typed API contracts from schema, and conducting peer-reviewed pull requests.
Apply the test pyramid strategy, pushing coverage to unit and service layers and reserving end-to-end UI suites for critical business journeys.
Build service virtualization and mocking capabilities using Playwright network interception and WireMock stubs to enable testing of downstream integrations without dependency on partner environments.
Engineer test data management for PLM, including item/BOM/change-order fixtures, revision and lifecycle states, seeded via API or ITK/SOA, ensuring repeatable setup and teardown.
Automate and validate asynchronous, event-driven, and distributed system behavior, including message queues, workflow engines, scheduled jobs, and batch/ETL pipelines.
Write deterministic assertions over eventual consistency using typed polling helpers with bounded waits and expect.poll-style retries, idempotency and replay checks, out-of-order and duplicate message handling, and dead-letter/retry paths.
Verify data integrity end-to-end across system boundaries, including reconciliation between source PLM, the PIM platform, and downstream consumers, as well as migration and cutover validation.
Integrate automated test suites into CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins and Rio) for fast, trustworthy feedback on every commit and deployment, managing the toolchain, dependency hygiene, and build caching.
Manage on-demand, isolated test environments for parallel suite execution without contention.
Maintain reporting and traceability, including Playwright traces, Allure dashboards, requirement-to-test coverage mapping, and clear triage of failures.
Design and execute performance, load, and soak tests for large data structures, bulk imports, and peak concurrent usage, defining and defending latency and throughput budgets.
Validate security and access control, including role- and project-based permissions, data segregation, authentication/SSO flows, and audit trails.
Cover accessibility, cross-browser, and cross-platform behavior for the PIM user experience.
Identify and document defects with detailed reproduction steps, evidence, and impact, collaborating with stakeholders to prioritize and drive resolution.
Engage with stakeholders to define and assess metrics monitoring product quality, such as automation coverage, escaped-defect rate, and regression cycle time.
Drive root-cause analysis on escaped defects and convert them into durable automated tests.