Build Quality Principal

PBM Build Quality Principal

In-Factory Quality Engineering, Automation & Release Evidence

Job Description

PBM Build Quality Principal will lead execution of the program's quality strategy across platform and product engineering builds. Working within the standards established by the PBM Test Architect Principal, this role is accountable for unit, contract, regression, evaluation, and automation testing, as well as the evidence required to demonstrate that releases meet agreed entry and exit criteria. The Principal will establish a consistent quality bar across New PBM Platform engineering teams and drive quality earlier into design and development.

This role partners closely with Product and Platform Engineering, Delivery, DevSecOps, Architecture, Test Data Engineering, the PBM Test Lead, and the PBS test organization. The Principal provides deep quality-engineering expertise, leads contractors or matrixed contributors where required, identifies systemic risks, and advances automation and responsible AI-enabled testing practices to improve release confidence, speed, and reliability.

Core Responsibilities Include

Build Quality Strategy Execution

• Operationalize the program test strategy within the New PBM Platform software factory and ensure engineering teams consistently meet the defined quality standards.

• Define build-level test plans, coverage expectations, automation requirements, evidence packages, and quality checkpoints for platform and product releases.

• Lead unit, contract, component, regression, evaluation, and other in-factory testing required before integration and end-to-end stages.

• Ensure defects, risks, exceptions, and unresolved quality concerns are transparent and appropriately escalated.

• Partner with the PBM Test Architect Principal to evolve standards based on delivery experience, defects, incidents, and emerging risks.

Automation & Quality Engineering

• Drive automation across the development and release pipeline, prioritizing repeatability, coverage, speed, and reliable evidence.

• Embed quality engineering into design, coding, pull-request, build, and deployment practices rather than relying on downstream detection.

• Partner with DevSecOps and engineering teams to integrate automated quality controls into CI/CD pipelines.

• Use AI to accelerate the quality lifecycle, including generation of unit, contract, and regression tests, synthetic test data, defect triage, root-cause analysis, and evidence assembly, judged on measured gains in cycle time and escape rate rather than tool adoption.

• Set the review bar for AI-generated test assets, covering what must be human-reviewed before it is trusted, how coverage claims are verified, and how traceability back to requirements is preserved.

• Advance service virtualization, testability, observability, synthetic data, and other techniques that reduce testing constraints.

Release Quality & Evidence

• Own compilation and validation of build-quality evidence against agreed entry and exit criteria.

• Provide clear quality assessments and recommendations for releases moving to integration and end-to-end testing.

• Establish scorecards for coverage, defect trends, escape rates, automation, stability, and quality risk.

• Lead root-cause analysis and systemic corrective action for recurring defects and quality failures.

• Partner with engineering leaders to ensure technical debt and quality risks are understood, prioritized, and addressed.

Technical Leadership & Partnership

• Serve as the senior quality-engineering advisor to platform and product engineering leaders.

• Mentor quality engineers, developers, and technical contributors in modern testing and defect-prevention practices.

• Coordinate with Test Data Engineering to ensure reliable, secure, representative, and reusable test data is available.

• Partner with the PBS Test Lead so build evidence, known risks, and open defects transfer cleanly into integration, end-to-end, and client-wave testing across the existing estate.

• Partner with the PBM Test Lead to keep coverage, automation, and evidence consistent across the platform and product build teams, and to resolve overlaps where the same capability is tested twice or falls between teams.

• Operate within the test architecture and quality standards set by the PBM Test Architect Principal, raising exceptions through that route rather than diverging locally.

• Lead matrixed or contracted quality resources and maintain consistent standards across delivery teams.

Critical Leadership Competencies

• Drives Vision and Purpose: Connects the role's work to the broader PBM transformation objectives and communicates a clear path forward.

• Delivers Results: Creates accountability, removes barriers, and drives measurable outcomes under demanding timelines.

• Manages Complexity: Synthesizes complex and sometimes conflicting information to establish practical solutions.

• Decision Quality: Makes sound, timely decisions using technical, delivery, risk, and business considerations.

• Collaborates: Builds effective partnerships across engineering, architecture, product, delivery, and business teams.

• Communicates Effectively: Provides clear, concise, and audience-appropriate communications, recommendations, and escalations.

• Manages Ambiguity: Establishes direction and momentum where requirements, solutions, or precedents are still emerging.

• Instills Trust: Builds credibility through transparency, expertise, follow-through, and sound judgment.

• Innovation: Identifies and applies better ways to improve quality, automation, evidence, and engineering productivity.

• Technical Influence: Shapes engineering behavior and quality decisions through expertise, credibility, and practical partnership.

Critical Technology Competencies

• Deep expertise in modern quality engineering, test automation, regression strategy, contract testing, and continuous testing.

• Experience with cloud-native platforms, APIs, distributed systems, event-driven architectures, data services, and complex integration environments.

• Hands-on knowledge of automated testing frameworks, CI/CD integration, environment and test-data dependencies, defect tooling, and quality analytics.

• Experience applying performance, resilience, security, accessibility, and other non-functional testing practices in partnership with specialists.

• Knowledge of AI-enabled testing approaches, including appropriate validation, privacy, security, and governance considerations.

• Hands-on experience testing cloud-native workloads on AWS, including containerized and serverless services, managed data and messaging services, and the observability tooling used to diagnose build and pipeline failures such as CloudWatch and X-Ray.

• Depth in automation tooling across the build layers, such as JUnit, TestNG, or pytest at unit and component level, Pact or WireMock for contract testing and service virtualization, and Playwright, Selenium, or Cypress where interface coverage is required.

• Experience embedding quality and security gates into CI/CD platforms such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Harness, alongside scanning tools such as SonarQube, Snyk, or Checkmarx and defect and test management tooling such as Jira with Xray or Zephyr.

• Practical experience with AI-assisted engineering tooling such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Amazon Q Developer, or Cursor, and with AI-enabled quality capabilities including generated unit and contract tests, synthetic test data, self-healing automation, and defect triage assistance.

• Products named above are illustrative of the depth expected in each category rather than individually required.

• Ability to convert quality data and technical findings into concise recommendations for engineering and leadership audiences.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent related experience required; advanced degree preferred.

• 10+ years of progressive experience in quality assurance, software testing, test automation, quality engineering, or related disciplines.

• Demonstrated experience leading quality practices across multiple engineering teams or a complex technology platform.

• Proven expertise designing and scaling automated testing and integrating quality controls into software-delivery pipelines.

• Experience working within an AI-assisted software development lifecycle (AI-SDLC), including the validation, security, and traceability controls required to rely on generated code and tests in a regulated environment.

• Experience directing matrixed contributors, contractors, or technical workstreams and influencing engineering leaders without direct authority.

• Strong analytical, problem-solving, written communication, and presentation skills.

• Experience in healthcare, pharmacy benefit management, regulated technology, or high-volume transaction-processing environments preferred.

If you will be working at home occasionally or permanently, the internet connection must be obtained through a cable broadband or fiber optic internet service provider with speeds of at least 10Mbps download/5Mbps upload.

For this position, we anticipate offering an annual salary of 151,600 - 252,600 USD / yearly, depending on relevant factors, including experience and geographic location.

This role is also anticipated to be eligible to participate in an annual bonus and long term incentive plan.

At The Cigna Group, you'll enjoy a comprehensive range of benefits, with a focus on supporting your whole health. Starting on day one of your employment, you'll be offered several health-related benefits including medical, vision, dental, and well-being and behavioral health programs. We also offer 401(k), company paid life insurance, tuition reimbursement, a minimum of 18 days of paid time off per year, paid holidays, and leaves of absence. For more details on our employee benefits programs, click here.