Principal QA Engineer - 90364281 -

Your success is a train ride away!

As we move America’s workforce toward the future, Amtrak connects businesses and communities across the country. We employ more than 20,000 diverse, energetic professionals in a variety of career fields throughout the United States. The safety of our passengers, our employees, the public and our operating environment is our priority, and the success of our railroad is due to our employees.

Are you ready to join our team?

Our values of ‘Do the Right Thing, Excel Together and Put Customers First’ are at the heart of what matters most to us, and our Core Capabilities, ‘Building Trust, Accountability, Effective Communication, Customer Focus, and Proactive Safety & Security’ are what every employee needs to know and do to be most impactful at Amtrak. By living the Amtrak values, focusing on our capabilities, and actively embracing and fostering diverse ideas, backgrounds, and perspectives, together we will honor our past and make Amtrak a company of the future.

SUMMARY OF DUTIES:

The Principal Quality Assurance Engineer works in a lead quality practices capacity to support teams with ways to improve their quality practices and implement better testing across the Amtrak DT ecosystem. This includes acting as a SME on quality practices, testing, and test tools, and offering guidance to teams and leadership on leading practices related to testing, test tools, and software quality.

Demonstrates an informed knowledge within Quality Assurance (QA) to resolve problems and assist with improvement of processes, on an ongoing basis. Supports several moderately complex business processes. May be allocated part time to one or more enterprise project initiatives of moderate to highly complexity. This role is responsible for creating exploratory tests that validate an application’s functionality. This role interacts with application development teams, business analysts/SMEs, business users and project managers to understand requirements and communicate status. 

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:

• Leads, guides, and provides cross functional (from the requirement domain) project oversight for the QA staff. 
• Proactively seeks to establish and maintain cooperative partnerships with multiple organizations across Amtrak including business partners, business services officers, architecture, software development and testing. 
• Responsible for assisting in the governance of DT disciplines.  Collects, analyzes, and documents QA management related activities.  
• Provides technical guidance and expertise to team members, colleagues, business partners and/or customers. 
• Expertise with creating exploratory tests, identifying tests that should be automated, and test management tools. 
• Directly handles requirement development tasks associated with high profile, high priority Amtrak strategic initiatives. 
• Manages automation frameworks in support of a variety of mobile (Appium) and web (Selenium) applications. 
• Confirms and verifies performance test standards in performance requirement gathering and Service Level Agreements (SLAs), development of performance test scripts, execution of scripts, analyzing performance results and writing and reviewing detailed test reports. 
• Lead research into automation capabilities for REST API’s, S3, applications in cloud etc. Lead overall automation framework design and enhancement. 
• Responsible for configuration, optimization, documentation and support of the test management software products and platforms. 
• Lead cross‐team collaboration with software development, architecture, and infrastructure teams to ensure releases are delivered with repeatable and auditable processes. 
• Helps lead planning sessions related to products, projects, or new technologies to implement process improvement across the enterprise. Documents discussions and agreements. Facilitates gate reviews, change advisor boards, and IT operational meetings.
• Establishes liaison relationship with business partners and DT departments in order to provide process solutions to meet user needs.
• Assesses process improvement opportunities utilizing a structured requirements process (gathering, analyzing, documenting, and managing changes) to assist in identifying priorities and advises on options.
• Provides factual content, analysis, and other information to guide development efforts and enhancement activities.
• Investigates, resolves, and escalates problems. Monitors and analyzes metrics to ensure customer satisfaction and vendor performance.
• Excellent interpersonal, communication and collaborative skills to work effectively with teams throughout the organization.
• Promotes an understanding of DT Service Management roles, processes, and activities to business units and DT departments. Supports and participates in formal Amtrak reporting.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business or related field with 7+ years of relevant work experience or 11+ years of relevant work experience required to satisfy education and experience requirements.
• Excellent knowledge of quality management.
• Minimum of 4 ‐ 6 years of experience leading large testing initiatives.
• Experience in Test Driven Development, and/or test automation for DevOps is big plus.
• Experience testing web, mobile, and API based applications.
• Development/testing experience for mainframe and distributed systems.
• Experience in Agile, Scrum, Kanban, XP, DevSecOps and SAFe environments.
• Experience with at least one RDBMS such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase.
• Experience in the transportation industry, particularly with reservation systems IBM z/Transaction Processing Facility (TPF) is a plus.
• Experience with CI/CD tools and implementations.
• Experience with SCM tools (Git/GitHub/BitBucket), Test Automation Tools (Cucumber, Selenium, Jacoco), Config/Provisioning Tools (Jenkins/Salt/Ansible), Scripting Tools a plus.
• Hands‐on experience creating and executing exploratory tests with little to no SUT knowledge.
• Experience with Jira and Xray for Jira.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Master’s degree in a related discipline.
• 9+ years relevant experience preferred.
• Certification in and Cloud Technologies; AWS Certified Solution Architect, MCSE: Cloud Platform and Infrastructure, Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA), Cloud Certified Professional is a plus.
• Active engagement in external software quality and agile communities with a network of professional contacts outside of the organization.

WORK ENVRIORNMENT:

• Work is performed remotely. 
• May require travel up to 20% of the time.
• Requires on‐call status.
• Additional Duties as assigned

COMMUNICATIONS AND INTERPERSONAL SKILLS:

Must have excellent oral and written communication skills.

The salary/hourly range is $125,580 - $162,750, Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to education, work experience, certifications, internal equity, etc. Depending on an employee’s assigned worksite or location, Amtrak may consider a geo-pay differential to be applied to the employee’s base salary. Amtrak may offer additional incentive and pay programs to recognize and reward our employees, including a short-term incentive bonus based upon factors such as individual and company performance that is commensurate with the level of the position and/or long-term incentive plan compensation. In addition to your salary, Amtrak offers a comprehensive benefit package that includes health, dental, and vision plans; health savings accounts; wellness programs; flexible spending accounts; 401K retirement plan with employer match; life insurance; short and long term disability insurance; paid time off; back-up care; adoption assistance; surrogacy assistance; reimbursement of education expenses; Public Service Loan Forgiveness eligibility; Railroad Retirement sickness and retirement benefits; and rail pass privileges. Learn more about our benefits offerings here.

Requisition ID:159660
Posting Location(s):N/A
Job Family/Function:Information Technology 
Relocation Offered:No 
Travel Requirements:Up to 25% 
 

You power our progress through your performance.
 

We want your work at Amtrak to be more than a job. We want your career at Amtrak to be a fulfilling experience where you find challenging work, rewarding opportunities, respect among colleagues, and attractive compensation. Amtrak maintains a culture that values high performance and recognizes individual employee contributions. 

Amtrak is committed to a safe workplace free of drugs and alcohol. All Amtrak positions requires a pre-employment background check that includes prior employment verification, a criminal history check and a pre-employment drug screen. 

Candidates who test positive for marijuana will be disqualified, regardless of any state or local statute, ordinance, regulation, or other law that legalizes or decriminalizes the use or possession of marijuana, whether for medical, recreational, or other use. Amtrak's pre-employment drug testing program is administered in accordance with DOT regulations and applicable law.  

In accordance with DOT regulations (49 CFR § 40.25), Amtrak is required to obtain prior drug and alcohol testing records for applicants/employees intending to perform safety-sensitive duties for covered Department of Transportation positions. If an applicant/employee refuses to provide written consent for Amtrak to obtain these records, the individual will not be permitted to perform safety-sensitive functions.

In accordance with federal law governing security checks of covered individuals for providers of public transportation (Title 6 U.S.C. §1143), Amtrak is required to screen applicants for any permanent or interim disqualifying criminal offenses. 

Note that any education requirement listed above may be deemed satisfied if you have an equivalent combination of education, training and experience.

Amtrak is an EOE/Affirmative Action Minority/Female employer, and we welcome all to apply. We consider candidates regardless of race/color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth and related conditions), national origin/ethnicity, age, disability (intellectual, mental and physical), veteran status, marital status, ancestry, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, genetic information, citizenship or any other personal characteristics protected by law.