Director, Software Engineering: Software Development Test (SDET)

Join us at The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) as a senior technology leader responsible for defining, driving, and scaling enterprise-wide test automation and quality engineering practices.

What You'll Do

As a technology leader, you will architect and implement advanced automation solutions across applications, data, and platforms, enable adoption of best practices, and establish governance, metrics, and tools.

Primary Duties and Responsibilities

• Define and execute the enterprise automation strategy aligned with business and technology modernization goals.
• Drive adoption of automation in all phases of testing, including automated regression and smoke tests to improve quality and accelerate testing.
• Implement automated quality gates, pre/post deployment checks, and shift-left testing.
• Architect scalable, reusable automation frameworks covering UI, API, microservices, data pipelines, Kafka/event-driven systems, batch jobs, reports, and databases.
• Define standards for BDD, contract testing, CI/CD integration, synthetic data generation, and environment-agnostic test automation.
• Establish tagging and traceability across automation framework, Jira, Confluence, test management tools, CI/CD pipelines, and Splunk.
• Introduce and scale synthetic test data management, environment/service virtualization for complex integration testing.
• Envision and implement AI/ML and Generative AI infused solutions for test case generation, test data generation, automation script generation, and quality insights.
• Build quality engineering and automation center of excellence to drive training, reusable asset libraries, and knowledge management artifacts.
• Partner with development, product, DevOps, and platform engineering leaders to embed automation into all stages of SDLC.
• Define, monitor, and report KPIs/OKRs for automation outcomes to executives and product owners.
• Drive compliance with industry standards, regulatory requirements, and audit readiness across automation and QE practices.

Supervisory Responsibilities

Manages a team of people managers, individual contributors, and consultants/contractors.

Qualifications

• Minimum fifteen years of IT experience, including ten years in test automation.
• Proven track record of leading enterprise-scale automation initiatives in complex, distributed environments.
• Hands‑on experience with service virtualization, synthetic test data management.
• Strong expertise in testing and test automation tools and frameworks, including Jira, BDD, Selenium, Cucumber, REST‑assured, JMeter, Playwright.
• Strong programming experience in Java and Python.
• Deep understanding of DevOps, CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, Harness, GitHub), cloud platforms (AWS, Azure), and containerized environments (Kubernetes, Docker).
• Experience with Kafka/event‑driven testing and large data set validations.
• Experience with Agile development processes for enterprise software solutions.
• Strong background in metrics‑driven quality reporting and risk‑based decision making.
• Strong organizational leadership skills and ability to manage multiple priorities.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to interact with internal and external customers, coworkers, and executive management.
• Results‑oriented record of developing initiatives that impact productivity.

Technical Skills

• Proficiency with modern quality engineering tools, including Jira, Jenkins, automation frameworks, and test management tools.
• Software QA methodologies: requirements analysis, test planning, functional testing, usability testing, performance testing.
• Familiarity with AI/ML/Generative AI solutions in QE.
• Experience with large‑scale cloud native projects, public cloud services, and migration.

Education

BS degree in Computer Science, Information Systems Management, or a similar technical field.

Benefits

• Hybrid work environment, up to 2 days per week of remote work.
• Technology stipend allowing use of device of choice while working remotely.
• Tuition reimbursement, student loan repayment assistance, and generous PTO and parental leave.
• 401(k) employer match and competitive health benefits.

Compensation

Salary range: $159,500 – $262,200. Incentive range: 23% – 30% annual discretionary incentive compensation.

Equal Opportunity Employer

OCC is an Equal Opportunity Employer.