Principal Software Engineer

Powering the world's payments ecosystem

ACI powers the payments ecosystem - globally, and you power ACI.

You'll innovate, collaborate, and grow - in an energetic technology culture with decades of proven success.

ACIers - in all roles and levels - are truly your colleagues and many are your friends.

Our size and reach allow you to see the global impact of your work.

You are visible, your talents are valued, and you are empowered to shape the future of payments.

JOB PURPOSE

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer in Test who treats quality not as a gatekeeping function but as a property of the entire software delivery system.

This engineer embeds quality thinking at every stage of the value stream - partnering with product, architecture, and engineering to define clear, testable acceptance criteria, and then coaching development teams to build and own fast, deterministic test suites themselves.

This is not a role that owns a separate test suite.

It is a role that makes every team better at testing their own software.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Quality Strategy & Acceptance Criteria


* Partner with product managers, architects, and engineers early in feature discovery to define clear, unambiguous acceptance criteria before a line of code is written.


* Translate business requirements into executable specifications so that acceptance criteria become living documentation and automated tests simultaneously.


* Define and maintain the test strategy for each product area, including the test pyramid rationale: what belongs in unit tests, component tests, integration tests, API contract tests, journey tests, and end-to-end (E2E) tests.


* Identify and eliminate test duplication, flakiness, and over-reliance on E2E tests that slow feedback loops - applying the principle that fast, reliable feedback is a strategic advantage.


* Drive shift-left quality practices: inspections, three-amigos sessions, example mapping, and lightweight design reviews that surface defects before they become bugs.

Test Architecture & Team Enablement


* Define standards, patterns, and shared tooling for E2E, journey, component, integration, and API contract tests; coach development teams to implement and own their own test coverage using those patterns.


* Establish Page Object Model, component-level isolation, and other maintainability patterns as team norms - through documentation, code review, and pairing - rather than by maintaining a central test suite.


* Review team-authored test code for coverage adequacy, correctness, and long-term maintainability; provide actionable, specific feedback that raises the team's collective skill.


* Design and deliver shared test infrastructure: data seeding utilities, synthetic data generation, service virtualization (WireMock, MockServer), and environment isolation strategies that teams can use independently.


* Set and enforce the standard that automation code is treat...