Principal Quality Engineer

At Lilly, we unite caring with discovery to make life better for people around the world. We are a global healthcare leader headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. Our employees around the world work to discover and bring life-changing medicines to those who need them, improve the understanding and management of disease, and give back to our communities through philanthropy and volunteerism. We give our best effort to our work, and we put people first. We're looking for people who are determined to make life better for people around the world.

About the Technology Organization

Technology at Lilly builds and maintains capabilities using pioneering technologies like most prominent tech companies. What differentiates Technology at Lilly is that we create new possibilities through tech to advance our purpose – creating medicines that make life better for people around the world, like data driven drug discovery and connected clinical trials. We hire the best technology professionals from a variety of backgrounds, so they can bring an assortment of knowledge, skills, and diverse thinking to deliver solutions in every area of our business.

About the Business Function

The Software Product Engineering (SPE) team is a specialised engineering group that delivers strategic solutions and differentiated capabilities. We take a forward-thinking approach, focusing on an enterprise platform and product mindset, ensuring that the solutions we build can be leveraged across Technology teams for broader impact and efficiency.

Within SPE, the Quality Engineering function ensures that every product meets the highest standards of performance, security, compliance, resilience, and user experience.

Job Title: Principal Quality Engineer/Test Architect

Role Summary

As a Principal Quality Engineer and Test Architect, you will define and drive the overall test architecture strategy across enterprise platforms, microservices, and cloud‑native applications. You will design scalable, maintainable, and future‑ready quality engineering frameworks, ensuring that testing is embedded into every stage of the software development lifecycle. You will partner with engineering leadership, product owners, and DevOps teams to establish best‑in‑class practices for automation, performance, security, accessibility, and resilience testing — while mentoring and guiding quality engineers across multiple teams.

What You'll Be Doing

• Architect enterprise‑level test automation frameworks for backend services, APIs (REST) and frontend applications using Webdriver.IO, Jest, React Testing Library, Cypress, Playwright, and emerging tools.
• Define and enforce quality engineering standards, coding guidelines, and architectural patterns for test automation across multiple product lines.
• Lead contract testing strategy (e.g., Pact) to ensure API compatibility across microservices and external integrations.
• Design performance, scalability, and resilience testing frameworks for distributed systems, event‑driven architectures, and serverless workloads.
• Integrate security testing (SAST, DAST, dependency scanning) into CI/CD pipelines, ensuring compliance with healthcare regulations (HIPAA, GDPR).
• Establish observability validation practices — ensuring logs, metrics, and traces meet operational and troubleshooting needs.
• Drive chaos engineering initiatives (AWS Fault Injection Simulator, Gremlin) to validate fault tolerance and disaster recovery strategies.
• Oversee accessibility testing aligned with WCAG 2.1/2.2 standards, ARIA roles, and automated audits (axe‑core).
• Collaborate with DevOps to embed continuous testing into CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, Docker, and AWS deployment workflows.
• Evaluate and introduce AI‑assisted testing tools for intelligent test generation, defect prediction, and risk‑based testing.
• Mentor and coach quality engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement.
• Advise product and engineering leadership on quality metrics, risk assessment, and release readiness.
• Champion shift‑left testing and test‑driven development (TDD/BDD) across teams.

How You Will Succeed

• Proven ability to design and implement enterprise‑scale test architectures.
• Deep understanding of microservices, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems.
• Expertise in performance, security, resilience, and compliance testing in regulated environments.
• Strong leadership and mentoring skills, with the ability to influence cross‑functional teams.
• Strategic thinking with a focus on scalability, maintainability, and future‑proofing.
• Excellent communication skills for technical and executive audiences.

What You Should Bring

• 10+ years of professional experience in software quality engineering, with at least 3 years in a test architect or principal role.
• Experience influencing enterprise‑wide quality strategies.
• Mastery of automated testing tools (Webdriver.IO, Jest, React Testing Library, Cypress, Playwright) and frameworks for backend and frontend.
• Strong experience with backend services built on , , and PostgreSQL (Sequelize, ).
• Expertise in Core Web Vitals and app performance optimisation using Jmeter/Loadrunner/any other equivalent tool.
• Hands on experience in application evaluation AI tools like DeepEval, RAGAS.
• Expertise in cloud infrastructure testing (AWS preferred) and containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field.
• Advanced knowledge of accessibility testing and WCAG standards.

• Experience with REST API testing and contract testing.

• Track record of leading quality engineering in regulated industries (Life Sciences a plus).

• Experience with responsive design testing and cross‑browser compatibility validation.
• Contributions to open‑source testing frameworks or QA communities.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with FeathersJS or similar service‑layer frameworks.
• Knowledge of design system validation (Material‑UI, Ant Design).
• Exposure to Veeva QMS systems and its Quality processes.
• Familiarity with modern build tools (Webpack, Vite, Babel, ESLint) for test integration and static analysis.
• Advanced experience with chaos engineering and resilience validation.
• Deep familiarity with observability platforms (Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry).

Lilly is dedicated to helping individuals with disabilities to actively engage in the workforce, ensuring equal opportunities when vying for positions. If you require accommodation to submit a resume for a position at Lilly, please complete the accommodation request form ) for further assistance. Please note this is for individuals to request an accommodation as part of the application process and any other correspondence will not receive a response.

Lilly does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, protected veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status.