Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer In Test

Powering the world's payments ecosystem

ACI powers the payments ecosystem – globally, and you power ACI. You'll innovate, collaborate, and grow – in an energetic technology culture with decades of proven success. ACIers – in all roles and levels – are truly your colleagues and many are your friends. Our size and reach allow you to see the global impact of your work. You are visible, your talents are valued, and you are empowered to shape the future of payments.

Job Purpose

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer in Test who treats quality not as a gatekeeping function but as a property of the entire software delivery system. This engineer embeds quality thinking at every stage of the value stream — partnering with product, architecture, and engineering to define clear, testable acceptance criteria, and then coaching development teams to build and own fast, deterministic test suites themselves.

This is not a role that owns a separate test suite. It is a role that makes every team better at testing their own software.

Essential Functions And Responsibilities

Quality Strategy & Acceptance Criteria

• Partner with product managers, architects, and engineers early in feature discovery to define clear, unambiguous acceptance criteria before a line of code is written.
• Translate business requirements into executable specifications so that acceptance criteria become living documentation and automated tests simultaneously.
• Define and maintain the test strategy for each product area, including the test pyramid rationale: what belongs in unit tests, component tests, integration tests, API contract tests, journey tests, and end-to-end (E2E) tests.
• Identify and eliminate test duplication, flakiness, and over-reliance on E2E tests that slow feedback loops — applying the principle that fast, reliable feedback is a strategic advantage.
• Drive shift-left quality practices: inspections, three-amigos sessions, example mapping, and lightweight design reviews that surface defects before they become bugs.

Test Architecture & Team Enablement

• Define standards, patterns, and shared tooling for E2E, journey, component, integration, and API contract tests; coach development teams to implement and own their own test coverage using those patterns.
• Establish Page Object Model, component-level isolation, and other maintainability patterns as team norms — through documentation, code review, and pairing — rather than by maintaining a central test suite.
• Review team-authored test code for coverage adequacy, correctness, and long-term maintainability; provide actionable, specific feedback that raises the team's collective skill.
• Design and deliver shared test infrastructure: data seeding utilities, synthetic data generation, service virtualization (WireMock, MockServer), and environment isolation strategies that teams can use independently.
• Set and enforce the standard that automation code is treated to the same engineering discipline as production code: reviewed, version-controlled, and refactored as a first-class artifact.
• Identify systemic gaps in test coverage across teams and coordinate cross-team efforts to close them without creating centralized bottlenecks.

CI/CD Pipeline Integration & Continuous Delivery

• Define pipeline quality gates and standards so that every commit triggers the appropriate level of automated feedback before code can progress to the next stage.
• Work with platform and development teams to integrate test suites into CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, or equivalent); coach teams to own their own pipeline health.
• Optimize test execution for speed and parallelism; identify and resolve bottlenecks that cause pipeline slowdown. Treat pipeline duration as a product metric.
• Champion a culture where a failing build is treated as a production incident and the pipeline is never left red.
• Advance trunk-based development practices and ensure test suite design supports continuous integration, not just continuous testing after a long-lived branch merge.
• Support release automation, feature toggles, and progressive delivery patterns that enable teams to decouple deployment from release.

Team Coaching & Quality Culture

• Act as an embedded quality advisor in lean product ceremonies — sprint planning, story refinement, retrospectives, and continuous improvement cycles — bringing a quality perspective without owning quality outcomes on behalf of the team.
• Work in tight feedback loops with product managers and engineers to validate that delivered software meets the intent of acceptance criteria, not just the letter.
• Reduce cycle time by surfacing defects as close to their origin as possible; track and report on escaped defects, mean time to detection, and test coverage trends.
• Mentor engineers across the team on testable design, test-driven development (TDD), and the application of the four-key DORA metrics as a quality feedback system.
• Facilitate three-amigos and example mapping sessions; build team capability to run these sessions independently over time.
• Document and share test strategies, automation patterns, and quality practices through internal guides, workshops, and code reviews — creating reusable assets the organization can build on.

Qualifications

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent demonstrated experience; Master's degree preferred.
• 7+ years of relevant experience may substitute for the degree requirement; the 5+ years of experience listed below remains required regardless.

Experience

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a majority focused on test automation and quality engineering.
• Proven track record of influencing testing practices across development teams rather than owning a centralized test suite.
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising team-level quality capability.
• Payments, financial services, or regulated industry experience preferred.

Core Technical Skills

• Strong proficiency with Playwright or similar E2E frameworks; ability to define scalable, maintainable test patterns and coach others in applying them — not necessarily building and owning the suites directly.
• Hands-on experience with Gherkin, Cucumber, SpecFlow, or equivalent; ability to facilitate example mapping and three-amigos sessions to produce executable specifications.
• Demonstrated experience designing unit, component, integration, API contract, journey, and E2E test strategies appropriate to the risk profile of each system.
• Strong practical experience with at least one major pipeline platform (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, CircleCI, or equivalent); able to build, maintain, and optimize pipelines.
• Proficiency with REST and GraphQL testing; experience with contract testing tools (Pact or equivalent).
• Strong proficiency in at least one of: TypeScript/JavaScript or C#; automation code should be indistinguishable in quality from production application code.
• Test data and environment management — experience with synthetic data generation, service virtualization (WireMock, MockServer), and environment isolation strategies.
• Deep familiarity with Git and trunk-based development, including its implications for test suite design and branch strategy.

Continuous Delivery & Engineering Culture

• Thorough understanding of Continuous Delivery principles as articulated in the field (Humble & Farley, Accelerate / DORA research, Team Topologies).
• Practical knowledge of the DORA four key metrics (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, MTTR, change failure rate) and how test automation strategy directly influences them.
• Experience operating in a trunk-based development environment with short-lived branches and high deployment frequency.
• Familiarity with feature flagging, canary releases, and progressive delivery patterns.

Professional Skills

• Ability to communicate technical quality risks clearly to non-technical stakeholders and product managers.
• Strong facilitation skills for three-amigos and example mapping sessions; ability to build team capability to run these independently.
• Comfort operating in lean, iterative environments where requirements evolve and feedback is rapid.
• A collaborative, non-gatekeeping mindset: quality is everyone's responsibility, and this role leads that cultural shift by raising team capability rather than absorbing team responsibility.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in payments, fintech, or other regulated industries where test coverage has compliance and audit implications (PCI-DSS, SOC 2).
• Familiarity with security testing practices relevant to regulated environments: OWASP awareness, authentication and authorization validation, and compliance-driven test coverage.
• Experience with performance and load testing integrated into the delivery pipeline.
• Experience with visual regression testing tools (Percy, Chromatic, or Playwright visual snapshots).
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