Principal Engineer - QA & Automation

Our Why

Datacom works with organisations and communities across Australia and New Zealand to make a difference in people’s lives and help organisations use the power of tech to innovate and grow.

About the Role (your why)

The bottleneck in modern software delivery is no longer writing code — it’s verifying that code works. As Principal Engineer – QA and Automation, you will own the quality architecture for a platform where AI agents generate a significant and growing share of production code. Your job is to build the verification and validation systems that make this possible — the automated oracle testing, risk-calibrated quality gates, integration harnesses, and regression infrastructure that give us confidence to ship at the speed AI enables.

What you’ll do

As Principal Engineer – QA and Automation you will be focused on:

• Designing and building automated verification systems that validate AI-generated code at scale — ensuring agent output meets correctness, integration, and compliance standards before it ever reaches a human reviewer.
• Architecting oracle-based testing strategies — capturing reference behaviour from existing systems and using it to verify that new implementations produce equivalent results. You’ll build the infrastructure that makes behavioural equivalence testing continuous and automated.
• Defining risk-calibrated verification strategies across the platform — payroll calculations and legislative compliance demand near-zero-defect rigour, while UI and infrastructure changes can tolerate lighter-touch approaches. You decide what level of scrutiny each change type gets.
• Building cross-service integration testing infrastructure that catches failures across domain boundaries. When AI agents generate code that compiles and passes unit tests but breaks at the seams, your systems catch it.
• Designing and maintaining comprehensive scenario corpora derived from real customer data, legislative requirements, and edge cases — the living test suites that define “correct” for every release.
• Building nightly regression harnesses that run the full scenario corpus, automatically triage failures, and surface actionable diagnostic.
• Defining the quality gates in our delivery pipeline — no code (human or AI-generated) reaches production without passing through your verification layers. You own the “fit to ship” decision framework.
• Establishing property-based and golden-master testing for deterministic domains — payroll calculations that must always produce the same output for the same input, tax tables that must match published rates, leave entitlements that must comply with legislation.
• Building the test infrastructure that enables continuous delivery — test data generators, environment provisioning, parallel execution, and reporting that scales with the pace of AI-assisted development.
• Mentoring engineers on verification-first thinking — shifting the team’s mindset from “testing after the fact” to “defining correctness before generation begins.”

We are a pretty agile company, and are keen to respond to customer, technology and internal stakeholders’ changing requirements — this means we evolve in our roles to meet those needs.

What you’ll bring

Required experience:

• Deep experience designing test automation at scale — framework architecture, not just test writing. You’ve built the harnesses and infrastructure, not just the test cases.
• Strong understanding of verification strategies beyond unit testing — behavioural equivalence, contract testing, golden-master testing, integration testing across distributed systems.
• Experience embedding quality gates into CI/CD pipelines — you know how to make the build pipeline enforce correctness without becoming a bottleneck.
• Proficiency in at least one of: C#/.NET, TypeScript/Node.js, or Python for building test tooling and automation frameworks.
• Experience testing event-driven or event-sourced systems — you understand the challenges of verifying systems where state is derived from streams of events rather than direct database queries.
• Strong analytical skills — you can look at a complex, regulated domain (payroll, compliance, financial calculations) and decompose it into a set of verifiable properties and scenarios.
• Experience with end-to-end testing frameworks (Playwright or similar) and the infrastructure to run them reliably at scale.
• Track record of building test data management solutions — scenario corpora, synthetic data generation, environment seeding — that enable comprehensive regression testing.
• Understanding of software quality beyond code coverage metrics — you think in terms of correctness, equivalence, confidence, and risk.
• Excellent communication skills — you can articulate quality risk to engineering leadership and translate compliance requirements into testable acceptance criteria.

Nice to have:

• Experience validating the outputs of AI or autonomous systems — you understand how to build confidence in non-deterministic code generation and have thought about what “correct” means when agents write code.
• Background in regulated domains (payroll, finance, healthcare) where calculation correctness and legislative compliance are non-negotiable.
• Experience with property-based testing, mutation testing, fuzzing, or formal verification techniques.
• Familiarity with observability-driven quality — using distributed tracing, structured logging, and production metrics to complement pre-deployment testing.
• Experience defining quality strategies for platforms undergoing a major technology transformation or replatforming effort.

Why join us here at Datacom?

Datacom is one of Australia and New Zealand’s largest suppliers of Information Technology professional services. We have managed to maintain a dynamic, agile, small business feel that is often diluted in larger organisations of our size.
It's our people that give Datacom its unique culture and energy that you can feel from the moment you meet with us.

We care about our people and provide a range of perks such as social events, chill-out spaces, remote working, flexi-hours and professional development courses to name a few. You’ll have the opportunity to learn, develop your career, connect and bring your true self to work. You will be recognised and valued for your contributions and be able to do your work in a collegial, flat-structured environment.

We operate at the forefront of technology to help Australia and New Zealand’s largest enterprise organisations explore possibilities and solve their greatest challenges, so you will never run out of interesting new challenges and opportunities.

We want Datacom to be an inclusive and welcoming workplace for everyone and take pride in the steps we have taken and continue to take to make our environment fun and friendly, and our people feel supported.