Lead Software Engineer - AI Quality Test Automation

At NiCE, we don’t limit our challenges. We challenge our limits. Always. We’re ambitious. We’re game changers. And we play to win. We set the highest standards and execute beyond them. And if you’re like us, we can offer you the ultimate career opportunity that will light a fire within you.

The Mission

As Lead Software Engineer – AI Quality & Test Automation, you own the strategy and execution of a modern, AI-accelerated test automation program. You build and run the platforms, frameworks, and CI quality gates that keep releases reliable at high velocity — using AI to scale test creation, maintenance, and triage across teams. You don’t retrofit testing onto AI workflows; you engineer quality into them from the ground up, ensuring every stage of an AI-assisted pipeline is observable, trustworthy, and continuously improving.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities

Platform & Automation Leadership

• Own the automation platform: define and build scalable frameworks, standards, and governance (services, APIs, UI) that enable teams to produce robust, consistent coverage

• Set direction for test automation tooling and AI-assisted techniques that accelerate test design, authoring, maintenance, and triage

• Lead by example — write automation, set the quality bar, mentor engineers, and drive adoption of the practices you establish

• Own CI automation health: build and maintain test environments, pipelines, and tooling (including containers/CI), reduce flakiness, and shorten feedback loops

• Be a highly visible advocate for quality — lead cross-team discussions, drive alignment and decisions, and escalate risks and blockers immediately

AI-Native Test Engineering

• Lead the adoption of LLM-powered test generation: from natural language requirement ingestion to executable, maintainable test output

• Build and maintain a self-healing test infrastructure layer — leveraging AI to detect broken selectors, drifted APIs, or changed behaviors and propose or apply fixes autonomously

• Define prompt engineering standards, context injection patterns, and RAG architectures that ground test generation in real codebase context

• Implement guardrails to ensure AI-generated test output is verified, traceable, and safe to ship — including versioning, ownership attribution, and confidence scoring

• Own automated coverage and risk reporting (unit/integration/e2e) and use it to drive targeted gap closure and release readiness

Quality Gates & CI/CD

• Lead risk-based test strategy with product and engineering — define acceptance criteria and quality gates that support high delivery velocity without sacrificing customer-impacting quality

• Design adaptive quality gates for AI-accelerated CI/CD pipelines — gates that reason about risk, not just pass/fail thresholds

• Build risk-scoring models that adjust gate strictness based on change scope, code origin (human vs. AI-generated), historical failure patterns, and deployment context

• Architect the observability layer for automated pipelines: surface signals that indicate poor quality decisions in real time

• Establish rollback and circuit-breaker patterns for autonomous deployments triggered by quality signal degradation

AI Model & Agent Validation

• Build behavioral testing frameworks for validating AI agents and LLM-powered features in production — testing non-deterministic outputs with statistical rigor

• Design evaluation benchmarks for internal AI tooling: measuring task completion accuracy, hallucination rates, and decision quality over time

• Define adversarial and edge-case testing methodologies for AI features: prompt injection resistance, boundary condition handling, and graceful degradation

• Partner with ML platform and data science teams to establish quality acceptance criteria for every model and agent promoted to production

Required Skills & Experience

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a strong emphasis on test automation (unit, integration, end-to-end) and quality engineering practices

• Strong programming skills in one or more languages: Python, TypeScript, Java, or C#

• Platform mindset — energized by building infrastructure and frameworks that enable product teams to move faster

• Experience building automation for APIs and distributed systems; UI automation experience is a plus

• Experience with CI/CD, test reporting/observability, and maintaining reliable pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Azure DevOps)

• Proven ability to apply AI/LLM tools to scale automation (e.g., generate/refine tests, expand edge cases, refactor brittle suites, accelerate failure triage) while implementing guardrails so AI output is verified, traceable, and safe to ship

• Hands-on understanding of agentic AI patterns: tool use, multi-agent orchestration, planning loops, and human-in-the-loop design as applied to quality workflows

• Familiarity with LLM failure modes relevant to quality: hallucination, context loss, sycophancy, and over-confident assertions

• Excellent debugging and root-cause analysis skills across code, data, and infrastructure

• Strong communication skills; able to translate quality risks into clear tradeoffs and action plans

• Demonstrated technical leadership across teams — driving standards, roadmap execution, and stakeholder alignment

• Self-directed, comfortable with ambiguity, and biased toward action

Desired Skills & Experience

• Modern test frameworks (e.g., pytest, JUnit, NUnit, Playwright, Cypress) and API testing (REST, gRPC)

• Containerization and environments: Docker; Kubernetes a plus

• Relational databases and SQL; ability to validate data pipelines and analytics outputs

• Experience with Elasticsearch or similar text-retrieval data stores

• Performance/load testing (e.g., JMeter, k6, Locust) and profiling/observability

• Cloud experience (AWS/Azure/GCP) and Infrastructure-as-Code (e.g., Terraform)

• Experience building AI-enabled automation workflows (e.g., Claude/OpenAI APIs, prompt patterns for test generation, repo-aware RAG, scripts/services that turn AI output into runnable tests)

• Familiarity with agent frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, or equivalents) and their tradeoffs in production quality pipelines

• Experience designing evaluation harnesses for non-deterministic AI systems — statistical confidence, behavioral consistency, and regression detection

• Agile software development experience (Scrum / XP)

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

About NiCE

NICE Ltd. (NASDAQ: NICE) software products are used by 25,000+ global businesses, including 85 of the Fortune 100 corporations, to deliver extraordinary customer experiences, fight financial crime and ensure public safety. Every day, NiCE software manages more than 120 million customer interactions and monitors 3+ billion financial transactions.

Known as an innovation powerhouse that excels in AI, cloud and digital, NiCE is consistently recognized as the market leader in its domains, with over 8,500 employees across 30+ countries.

NiCE is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, neurotype, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation or any other category protected by law.