PNC is a finance and insurance company that emphasizes the importance of its people in delivering the best customer experience. The Senior Software Engineer - Backend Quality Engineer / Automation will focus on building and scaling automated testing capabilities to ensure robust, scalable solutions for critical payment services.
Responsibilities:
- Hands-on ownership of automation frameworks and suites for one or more services/products
- Drives automation coverage and reliability improvements; owns triage workflows and reduces flakiness and runtime
- Partners with engineers to ensure stories are testable and quality gates are met before promotion
- Design, build, and maintain automated test frameworks and suites for APIs and services; expand coverage while keeping tests deterministic and fast
- Create reusable automation patterns (data builders, helpers, stubs/mocks where appropriate) to reduce duplication and improve maintainability
- Own regression automation health: flake reduction, runtime optimization (parallelization where appropriate), and clear failure triage signals
- Define and implement a layered test strategy (unit, component/service, integration, end-to-end) aligned to change risk and payment criticality
- Integrate automated tests into CI/CD and define/enforce quality gates for merge and promotion readiness (evidence-based Definition of Done)
- Drive defect prevention: analyze defect leakage trends, run retrospectives on escapes, and implement systemic fixes (test gaps, unclear requirements, missing validations)
- Partner with Engineers, Architects, and Business Systems Analyst/Product Owners early to clarify acceptance criteria, edge cases, and testability; translate behavior into executable checks where appropriate
- Provide quality feedback during design and product review cycles; promote testability, observability, and safe change patterns
- Support release readiness by validating test evidence and coordinating with change/release processes as needed
- Contribute to performance and resiliency validation approaches where appropriate (test data, scenarios, and automation hooks)
- Ensure monitoring and diagnostic artifacts exist for failures (logs/metrics/traces) and that test failures are actionable
Requirements:
- Strong experience in test automation engineering (building and maintaining automation frameworks and suites)
- Experience designing layered test strategies and integrating automated tests into CI/CD with meaningful quality gates
- Comfort partnering with developers on testability, defect prevention, and release readiness; evidence-based communication style
- Experience testing APIs/services and validating data flows; working familiarity with SQL and data validation concepts is a plus
- Experience in regulated or high-integrity domains (payments, banking, money movement) with strong focus on correctness and auditability
- Experience with BDD-style executable specifications and/or API automation tools commonly used in enterprise environments (tool-agnostic)
- Experience with performance testing concepts and test data management practices
- Hands-on ownership of automation frameworks and suites for one or more services/products
- Drives automation coverage and reliability improvements; owns triage workflows and reduces flakiness and runtime
- Partners with engineers to ensure stories are testable and quality gates are met before promotion
- Design, build, and maintain automated test frameworks and suites for APIs and services; expand coverage while keeping tests deterministic and fast
- Create reusable automation patterns (data builders, helpers, stubs/mocks where appropriate) to reduce duplication and improve maintainability
- Own regression automation health: flake reduction, runtime optimization (parallelization where appropriate), and clear failure triage signals
- Define and implement a layered test strategy (unit, component/service, integration, end-to-end) aligned to change risk and payment criticality
- Integrate automated tests into CI/CD and define/enforce quality gates for merge and promotion readiness (evidence-based Definition of Done)
- Drive defect prevention: analyze defect leakage trends, run retrospectives on escapes, and implement systemic fixes (test gaps, unclear requirements, missing validations)
- Partner with Engineers, Architects, and Business Systems Analyst/Product Owners early to clarify acceptance criteria, edge cases, and testability; translate behavior into executable checks where appropriate
- Provide quality feedback during design and product review cycles; promote testability, observability, and safe change patterns
- Support release readiness by validating test evidence and coordinating with change/release processes as needed
- Contribute to performance and resiliency validation approaches where appropriate (test data, scenarios, and automation hooks)
- Ensure monitoring and diagnostic artifacts exist for failures (logs/metrics/traces) and that test failures are actionable
- Roles at this level typically require a university / college degree, with 3+ years of relevant / direct industry experience
- Certifications are often desired
- In lieu of a degree, a comparable combination of education, job specific certification(s), and experience (including military service) may be considered
- Bachelors
- Application Development
- Automation Engineering
- Backend Testing
- Business Management
- CI/CD
- Continuous Integration (CI) Tools
- Customer Solutions
- Design
- Group Problem Solving
- Process Improvements
- Release Management
- Software Solutions
- User Experience (UX) Design