Principal Software Test Engineer

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) is part of the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan. The consortium maintains the world’s largest archive of social scientific data with 10,000+ studies relating to education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and more. A global leader in data science, ICPSR also supports continuing education in research design, statistics, and data analysis. ICPSR employs 15 research faculty, 95 professional staff, and has an annual operating revenue of more than $15 million.

ICPSR is looking for a Principal Software Test Engineer to join our Computing and Network Services (CNS) team. Our team provides services, web applications, and data products to a growing user community of social science researchers, students, instructors, and policymakers. If you are passionate about implementing a testing life cycle aimed at improving product quality, and can teach others to do the same, we want to talk to you!

You will report to the CNS Director at ICPSR.

• Lead automated test engineering in an agile continuous deployment environment (30%)
• Implement Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and Test-Driven Development (TDD) practices and pipelines (30%)
• Teach best practices in automated test engineering, BDD, TDD to the development team (20%)
• Establish test metrics and measure test effectiveness for continuous improvement of product quality (10%)
• Coach Product Owner team in writing testable acceptance criteria (5%)
• Evaluate multiple testing technologies, select the best fit, and implement it (5%)

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science / Engineering, or a related field
• 7 or more years of experience writing automated unit, integration test cases using technologies such as JUnit, Jest, React testing library
• 5 or more years experience practicing Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and Test-Driven Development (TDD)
• 5 or more years experience automating functional, regression, user acceptance tests using tools such as Selenium, Cucumber, or Robot framework
• 3 or more years experience using Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) / GitOps tools such as Gitlab, Jenkins, Jenkins X, Flux, or ArgoCD
• Experience with code quality, performance, security testing and integrating relevant tools in the CI/CD pipeline
• Experience leading testing lifecycle for multiple software applications / products
• Experience teaching testing best practices to an Agile software development team

• Master’s degree in Computer Science / Engineering, or related field
• Experience developing applications with Java, Spring, Hibernate, and Spring Boot
• Experience developing UI applications with React, NextJS and NodeJS
• Experience using Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Experience developing automated tests for API using tools such as Postman
• Experience developing automated tests for infrastructure-as-code using tools such as Terraform, AWS CDK, AWS TaskCat, and Helm chart tests
• Experience with performance testing and monitoring tools such as JMeter, LoadRunner, DataDog, or New Relic
• Experience with SQL, relational databases such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and testing data layer code using tools such as Mockito and Flyway test extensions
• Experience with shell scripting, Python
• Experience with cyber-security threat mitigation and vulnerability finding remediation
• Experience with statistical packages such as SPSS, SAS, Stata, or R

This will be filled at the lead level salary range of $100,000-120,000. The requirements listed reflect the lead level expectation. Candidates with lesser experience are encouraged to apply and may be considered if the primary goal is not met. Lesser-experienced candidates will be reviewed at the senior level salary range of $80,000-99,000.

The Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan wants to recruit and retain a diverse workforce as a reflection of our commitment to serve the diverse people of Michigan, to maintain the excellence of the university, and to ground our research in varied disciplines, perspectives, and ways of knowing and learning.

Benefits at the University of Michigan