Role summary

As a Principal Software Development Engineer in Test, you own the quality bar for the Reliability Engineering function and act as the shift-left engineering partner across the wider application support organization. You are an engineer first and a tester second. You write code, you build test frameworks, you instrument quality signals into pipelines, and you raise the engineering standard for everything that ships through the team.

This is not a manual QA role and it is not a role that catches defects late. You move quality left into design reviews, code reviews, CI gates, and observability, and you build the automated test machinery that lets a small engineering team ship agentic runbooks, remediation logic, and operational platforms with confidence. You are the engineer the team relies on to make sure what reaches production has been engineered for verifiability from the start.

You partner with the senior reliability engineering leads, the agentic platform engineering team, and the senior architect. You are the single named owner for test strategy across your function, and the consulting voice on quality engineering across the wider organization.

What youll be doing

- 1) Shift-left test engineering and design partnership: Embed in design reviews and architecture conversations before code is written. Raise testability, observability, and failure-mode questions early, and make sure the answers are engineered in, not bolted on.
- Define the test strategy for each platform, runbook, or agent the team ships, including unit, contract, integration, end-to-end,



and behavioural tests for agentic and AI-augmented components.
- Set the quality gates that releases must transparent in CI, and own the conversation when a gate blocks a release. The gates exist because you defended them.
- 2) Test automation framework engineering: Build and maintain the test automation frameworks used across the reliability and agentic engineering teams. Engineers consume what you build; you do not write tests case by case for them.
- Engineer test harnesses for agentic systems: deterministic evaluation of agent outputs, regression suites for prompt and policy changes, golden-set comparison, and replay-based testing for runbook automation.
- Build contract tests between the agentic automation layer, the observability platform, the ITSM system of record, and the applications they act on, so changes on either side surface in CI rather than in production.
- Build chaos and resilience tests that exercise failure paths the team would not otherwise see until an incident.
- 3) CI/CD quality gating and pipeline ownership: Own the quality stages in the teams CI/CD pipelines, including static analysis, security scanning hooks, coverage thresholds, performance regression checks, and gating policies.
- Drive shift-left static analysis, security linting, and dependency-risk checks into pull-request workflows, and tune them so they catch real issues without becoming noise.

Disclaimer: This job posting has been aggregated from external source. Role details, content, and availability are subject to change. Applicants are advised to confirm the latest information directly on the company website before applying.

📌 Principle SDET (Hyderabad)
🏢 Eli Lilly
📍 Hyderabad