About the job
Our Mission
At Datacom, we are driven by a commitment to empower organizations and communities throughout Australia and New Zealand, harnessing technology to foster innovation and growth.
Role Overview
In the rapidly evolving landscape of software development, the challenge lies not in writing code but in validating its functionality. As the Lead Principal Engineer – QA and Automation, you will spearhead the quality architecture for a platform where AI agents play a pivotal role in generating production code. Your responsibility encompasses the creation of robust verification and validation systems, including automated oracle testing, risk-based quality gates, integration frameworks, and regression infrastructures, that enable us to deliver at the unprecedented pace facilitated by AI.
Key Responsibilities
As the Lead Principal Engineer – QA and Automation, your focus will include:
- Designing and implementing automated verification systems to validate AI-generated code on a large scale, ensuring that outputs meet correctness, integration, and compliance standards prior to human review.
- Architecting oracle-based testing strategies that capture existing system behaviors to verify new implementations against equivalent results, facilitating continuous and automated behavioral equivalence testing.
- Establishing risk-based verification strategies tailored to the platform's needs, where critical processes like payroll calculations demand near-zero defects, while other changes may allow for more lenient scrutiny.
- Creating cross-service integration testing frameworks that identify failures across different domains, ensuring that AI-generated code that passes initial tests does not break under real-world conditions.
- Designing and maintaining a comprehensive set of scenario corpora derived from actual customer data and legislative requirements, defining the standards for correctness in each release.
- Building nightly regression harnesses that execute the full scenario corpus, automatically triaging failures and providing actionable diagnostics.
- Defining quality gates within our delivery pipeline, ensuring that no code, whether human or AI-generated, advances to production without passing through your rigorous verification processes.
- Implementing property-based and golden master testing for deterministic scenarios, ensuring outputs remain consistent for the same inputs.
- Developing the test infrastructure that supports continuous delivery, including test data generators, environment provisioning, and parallel execution capabilities.
