Principal Test Automation Engineer

Principal Test Automation Engineer

Location: Santa Clara, Ca / Remote, US

Role Overview

d-Matrix is hiring a Principal Software Engineer to define and build how we use AI-enabled automation across the software development lifecycle, from build and CI through testing and release. Our codebase spans a kernel compiler, firmware, device drivers, and an inference serving stack running on silicon we designed ourselves. Tests require real hardware, correctness is numerical rather than pass/fail, and failures can originate in any of several layers.

You will set the technical direction for AI-enabled workflow automation and build the foundations other engineers rely on, including the agent harness, integrations into GitLab, Jira, test results, and logs, guardrails, and evaluation methods that show whether an automation actually helped. You will stay hands-on and ship the hardest pieces yourself, working alongside a Senior/Staff engineer in the same area while raising the bar for how the broader engineering organization uses AI in its daily work.

What You Will Do

• Set the technical direction for AI-enabled workflow automation across build, CI, test, and release.
• Build the shared foundation, including the agent harness and tool integrations into GitLab, Jira, test results, logs, and observability data.
• Develop evaluation methodology to measure whether an automation saves time and preserves correctness.
• Define guardrails and standards for where AI acts autonomously, where it proposes and a human decides, and how every change stays auditable.
• Deliver the first Quality Engineering automations, including cross-layer failure attribution, failure clustering and defect deduplication, coverage-gap analysis, and release-readiness summaries.
• Raise the bar across engineering through shared patterns, design reviews, and mentoring.
• Determine when an agent, a deterministic tool with a narrow model step, or a simple script is the right solution, and teach that judgment to others.

What You Will Bring

• Extensive production software engineering experience, with strong Python skills.
• Enough Rust and/or C++ experience to understand build flows and diagnose compiler errors.
• Experience shipping AI-enabled tools or automation that others relied on in production, beyond demos.
• Deep hands-on experience with LLM APIs, agent harnesses, tool integration, and context engineering.
• Experience designing evaluations for nondeterministic systems, showing that an automation helped without breaking something else.
• Sound judgment about when AI is the right tool, including examples of choosing not to use it.
• Strong fluency across the development lifecycle, including CI/CD, testing, and release processes.
• A track record of setting technical direction across teams that do not report to you.

Preferred Qualifications

• Exposure to compilers, firmware, or hardware-in-the-loop test environments.
• Experience building tool integrations with MCP or similar protocols.
• Experience working with GitLab, Jira, or Prometheus APIs.
• Experience managing cost and latency in LLM-based systems.
• Daily use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot, with well-formed opinions on where they help and where they do not.