The Role
Owns test strategy and automation for pricing services, APIs, events, integrations, cloud deployments, and ML outputs. Builds CI/CD quality gates, investigates defects, supports release readiness, monitors quality metrics, and improves testability and coverage. Partners with engineering and product teams, mentors QA professionals, contributes to incident response, and ensures compliance with regulatory and data-handling requirements.
Summary Generated by Built In
Be yourself at Protolabs
Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. We are an equal opportunity employer, and we are committed to building a diverse team that feels they are valued in the workplace. So do you feel you do not meet every single requirement but still intrigued? We encourage you to still apply! You can help make our company even better. We do not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, age, mental or physical ability, or any way you represent yourself. We strongly believe diversity makes for more successful teams.
Why Protolabs?
We are the leaders in digital manufacturing. We hire doers, makers, and creative thinkers who tackle our roles with an entrepreneurial spirit. Our culture is centered around meaningful work that brings new and innovative products to market at unprecedented speeds. We are a diverse team that comes from all walks of life and take pride in our team who is smart, genuine, humble, and passionate about what we do. It’s our people who fuel our creativity and make our culture feel like home.
Join our team as a Senior Software Quality Engineer!
This is a fixed hybrid role on-site Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday at HQ in Maple Plain, MN.
What you’ll do
- Support and evolve the test strategy for the Pricing domain, covering functional, integration, contract, regression, and non‑functional testing such as performance, reliability, and ML quality gating across services and APIs
- Design, implement, and maintain automated test suites for APIs, events, integrations, and targeted end‑to‑end and performance scenarios aligned with the team’s architecture, including API and event‑driven components and cloud deployments
- Own and extend continuous testing within GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines, ensuring test execution on PRs, enforcing quality gates, reporting results, managing flaky tests, and integrating with deployment workflows.
- Validate pricing and ML outputs for correctness, edge cases, and regression, including geometry‑driven estimates, probabilistic forecasts, and model‑serving behaviour where applicable
- Partner with engineers to improve testability through clear acceptance criteria, observable systems, contract testing between services, and shift‑left practices during code reviews. Investigate defects in production and pre‑production environments, perform root cause analysis, and drive preventative improvements such as closing automation gaps, increasing coverage, and enhancing processes
- Contribute to release readiness by assessing risks, defining regression scope, providing go or no‑go input, and verifying system behaviour after release for pricing‑critical changes
- Monitor quality metrics including coverage trends, defect escape rates, pipeline stability, and SLA‑related signals, and communicate status clearly to engineering and product leadership while automating post‑release monitoring
- Mentor QA engineers and SDETs, promote testing standards, establish coding conventions for tests, and drive shared ownership of quality and testing frameworks across the engineering organisation. Participate in on‑call or incident support rotations when needed, focusing on reproductions, adding automated regression coverage, and ensuring long‑term fixes
- Ensure the test approach aligns with relevant regulatory, audit, and data handling requirements, especially in the context of commercial pricing systems
What you’ll bring
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- 7+ years of experience in software quality assurance, test automation, or SDET roles in a SaaS or production environment
- Experience owning test automation and CI integration for backend or platform teams
- Proven track record of leading test strategy or automation initiatives across cross functional products
- Strong programming skills for test automation, especially in Python, with C# as a plus, and comfortable working directly in engineering codebases including reviews, fixes, shared libraries, and build pipelines
- Solid experience with API and UI testing, along with component integration and service level integration testing
- Hands on experience designing and maintaining GitHub Actions or similar CI pipelines, including parallel jobs, artefacts, secrets management, branch protections, and failure triage
- Good understanding of databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL, including writing data setup and assertions, understanding migration impacts, ensuring test isolation, and writing complex SQL queries
- Experience working in cloud environments such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, and familiarity with containerised workloads including
- Docker and basic Kubernetes concepts for test environments
- ISTQB certification at foundation or advanced level, or equivalent formal QA training, with practical application of structured test design techniques such as equivalence partitioning, boundary value analysis, risk based testing, traceability, and quality modelling
- Strong analytical skills when working in ambiguous domains, with the ability to translate finance, sales, and business rules into clear test cases and automation
- A strong quality mindset with attention to detail, especially around pricing rules and regression in revenue impacting flows
- Exposure to ML and MLOps testing, including model validation, A B or backtesting support, monitoring inference pipelines, and ensuring data quality
- Experience with tools such as pytest, Playwright or similar for selective UI and API flows, Postman or Newman, contract testing frameworks, and performance tools like Locust
- Familiarity with observability practices including logs, metrics, and traces for test failure diagnosis and production like verification
- Experience participating in on call or incident response within a platform team
- Experience with DBT or data testing frameworks
Nice to have
What's in it for you?
- We offer a competitive salary and annual bonus opportunity
- In addition, we offer amazing benefits including but not limited to:
- Health Insurance: Traditional OR High Deductible plan
- Flexible Spending Accounts
- Health Savings Account (including employer contributions)
- Dental and Vision
- Basic and Supplemental Life Insurance
- Short-Term and Long-Term Disability
- Paid caregiver leave
- You will receive PTO + Holiday Pay + Wellness Hours + Volunteer Hours
- 401k with company match and immediate vest
- Employee Stock Purchase Program at a 15% discounted rate
- Matching grants through Protolabs foundation
- And More!
Proto Labs maintains ITAR-compliant operations in all of our United States based facilities. Due to ITAR regulations, this role is only open to U.S. Citizens, lawful permanent residents (green card holders) or foreign nationals granted refugee or asylee status. Individuals with temporary visas (e.g. E, F-1, H-1, H-2, L, B, J, TN or OPT) are not eligible for hire in this role.
Proto Labs, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer
Physical Demands:
While performing the essential duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit; use a computer keyboard, monitor and mouse, telephone and printer; reach with hands, and arms, talk, see and hear. The employee is occasionally required to stand, walk, stoop or kneel and must occasionally lift and/or move up to 25 pounds.
Work Environment:
Indoors (A/C); nonsmoking; the majority of this job function is performed in an office setting requiring normal safety precautions. However, there may be job duties that require the employee to spend time in the manufacturing areas exposed to machinery and noise; eye protection occasionally required. Occasionally works in outside weather conditions. Occasionally works near moving mechanical parts and in high, precarious places and is occasionally exposed to wet and/or humid conditions, fumes or airborne particles, toxic or caustic chemicals, risk of electrical shock and vibration. The noise level in the work environment is usually quiet to moderate.
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- 7+ years of experience in software quality assurance, test automation, or SDET roles in a SaaS or production environment
- Experience owning test automation and CI integration for backend or platform teams
- Experience leading test strategy or automation initiatives across cross-functional products
- Strong Python programming skills for test automation; C# experience is a plus
- Experience with API, UI, component integration, and service-level integration testing
- Hands-on experience designing and maintaining GitHub Actions or similar CI pipelines
- Experience with PostgreSQL or MySQL, test data setup, assertions, migration impacts, test isolation, and complex SQL queries
- Experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure cloud environments
- Experience with Docker and basic Kubernetes concepts
- ISTQB foundation or advanced certification, or equivalent formal QA training
- Practical application of equivalence partitioning, boundary value analysis, risk-based testing, traceability, and quality modeling
- Strong analytical skills translating finance, sales, and business rules into test cases and automation
- Exposure to ML and MLOps testing, model validation, A/B or backtesting, inference monitoring, and data quality
- Experience with pytest, Playwright, Postman, Newman, contract testing frameworks, or Locust
- Familiarity with logs, metrics, and traces for failure diagnosis and production-like verification
- Experience participating in on-call or incident response within a platform team
- Experience with DBT or data testing frameworks
Protolabs Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Protolabs and has not been reviewed or approved by Protolabs.
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Healthcare Strength — Medical, dental, and vision options are broadly available and described as good to excellent. Additional protections like short- and long-term disability and life insurance bolster the overall package.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — A starting PTO allotment plus paid holidays, along with added wellness and volunteer time, is emphasized, with some roles noting PTO growth over tenure. Paid caregiver leave appears in postings and supports flexibility for life events.
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Retirement Support — A 401(k) with company match and immediate vesting is offered, supporting long-term savings. This foundation is frequently cited alongside core financial benefits as a strong element of total rewards.
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The Company
What We Do
Protolabs is the world's fastest digital manufacturing source for rapid prototyping and on-demand production. The technology-enabled company produces custom parts and assemblies in as fast as 1 day with automated 3D printing, CNC machining, sheet metal fabrication, and injection molding processes. Our digital approach to manufacturing enables accelerated time to market, reduces development and production costs, and minimizes risk throughout the product life cycle. 3D Printing Our 3D printing service offers a wide selection of materials and technologies to create prototypes and end-use parts with complex geometries and detailed features. With tight process controls, careful design reviews, and extensive quality monitoring, we ensure precise and repeatable 3D-printed parts, every time. CNC Machining We use 3- and 5-axis milling along with turning to machine parts from commercial-grade plastics and metals. Our online quoting system and automated manufacturing process enable us to ship parts within 24 hours, helping customers accelerate development and reduce time to market. Sheet Metal Fabrication Protolabs is an industry leader in quick-turn sheet metal parts for both prototyping and low-volume production. Our digital approach to manufacturing enables us to fabricate sheet metal parts in as fast as 5 days. Additionally, we can support our customers’ development efforts with component assemblies, several finish options, and screen printing. Injection Molding Our injection molding service offers two options—prototyping and on-demand manufacturing—which provide customers a tooling solution that aligns with their project’s requirements. It’s used for quick-turn prototyping, bridge tooling, and low-volume production of up to 10,000+ parts in 15 days or less.
