Chicago Board Options Exchange

Senior QA Automation Test Engineer

Chicago Board Options Exchange • $121K — $157K *
Information Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 7+ years in quality assurance with strong automation focus
  • Bachelor's in Computer Science or related discipline, or equivalent practical experience
  • Proven leadership and mentorship of junior engineers
  • Strong command of Java, with ability to architect and extend test frameworks
  • Hands-on automated testing experience with Cucumber, Selenium, or Playwright
  • Understanding of relational databases and ability to write queries
  • Strong analytical mindset for fast-paced, cross-team collaboration

Responsibilities

  • Help set quality standards and review practices across teams
  • Mentor engineers to elevate the standard of practice
  • Define release confidence metrics including coverage expectations
  • Set test data and environment strategy for reproducibility
  • Influence engineering practices for testability before coding
  • Design and build automated test frameworks for UI, API, and integration
  • Validate end-to-end clearing workflows and ensure data accuracy

Benefits

  • Generous paid time off, including vacation, personal days, and sick days
  • Flexible, hybrid work environment
  • Comprehensive health, dental, and vision benefits
  • 2:1 401(k) match, up to 8% match immediately upon hire
  • Discounted Employee Stock Purchase Plan
  • Paid tuition assistance and education opportunities
  • Complimentary lunch, snacks, and coffee in Cboe offices
Full Job Description
Job Description:

Location Overview

Cboe HQ is located in the historic Old Post Office district, it's a landmark that blends classic architecture with modern amenities. The building features expansive spaces with high ceilings and large windows, offering an abundance of natural light and panoramic views of the city skyline and the Chicago River.

With its prime location in the heart of downtown, the OPO Building provides easy access to major transportation hubs, including Union Station and multiple CTA lines, making it convenient for commuters. The building is home to a variety of amenities, including restaurants, a fitness center, and collaborative workspaces, creating a vibrant and dynamic work environment in one of Chicago's most iconic areas.

Role Overview

Cboe Clear U.S. (CCUS) is a regulated clearinghouse. We clear the event contracts and prediction markets listed on Cboe's exchanges, and we are building toward tokenized collateral, 24x7 operation, and the infrastructure that carries traditional finance onto DeFi rails.

CCUS Software Engineering is a high trust environment. Failure leads to inquiry rather than blame. Working across team boundaries is expected rather than tolerated. We solve the problem, then we write the code. Design documents and architecture decision records come first. The engineers we value most close their feedback loop. They write tests, and they instrument what they ship so it fails fast, explains itself in production, leaves an audit trail and rolls back cleanly.

The Senior QA Automation Test Engineer sets the strategy for proving the platform works. The difference from our QA Automation Test Engineer is scope. That role builds coverage for a team, while you architect the frameworks other engineers build on and own test strategy across the platform.

Your responsibilities will be:
  • Helping set quality standards and review practices that are held consistently across teams.
  • Mentoring engineers and raising the standard of practice around you.
  • Defining what release confidence means here, including coverage expectations and escaped defect targets.
  • Setting the test data and environment strategy, so clearing scenarios stay reproducible as the platform grows.
  • Influencing how engineering builds for testability, before code is written.
  • Designing and building automated test frameworks across UI, API and integration layers.
  • Validating end-to-end clearing workflows including trade processing, margin, settlement and reconciliation.
  • Ensuring data accuracy and consistency across distributed systems.
  • Embedding automated testing into delivery pipelines so failures surface early and loudly.
  • Owning test coverage as a measurable outcome and driving escaped defects down over time.
  • Building and maintaining the test data and test environments that make clearing scenarios reproducible.
  • Partnering with engineering teams to define testable solutions before code is written.
  • Documenting test strategy and coverage decisions so they outlast any one release.


Required:
  • Proven leadership and mentorship of junior engineers
  • Driving QA across the full application lifecycle, from test strategies, test plans and test cases through smoke, regression, functional, and integration testing
  • Understanding of relational databases, and comfortable writing queries to validate data across systems
  • Solid grounding in object-oriented and functional programming, software engineering principles, design patterns and data modeling fundamentals
  • A strong analytical mindset, and comfort working across teams in a fast-paced environment
  • Hands-on automated testing with Cucumber, Selenium or Playwright
  • Strong command of Java, with the depth to architect, build, and extend test frameworks for other engineers
  • API testing across REST, using RestAssured, Postman or an equivalent


Preferred:
  • AI-powered testing tools, including test generation and self-healing frameworks
  • The FIX messaging protocol
  • Kafka or another event streaming platform
  • Clearing, trading or other financial systems
  • Managing a testing team or planning testing activities for a team


Nice to have:
  • Python as a second test-authoring language
  • Working knowledge of Docker, Podman or similar container runtimes
  • Exposure to AWS or similar Cloud Platform
  • Test data and environment management at scale, including adapting test flows as live data changes
  • Executing performance, resiliency and failover testing, including business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) scenarios


Current technology stack:

Java on Kubernetes. Application code and CI pipelines live in GitHub with GitHub Actions. Container images and build artifacts live in registries such as Harbor and Artifactory, and Helm charts are deployed by ArgoCD from a GitOps repository. PostgreSQL, Kafka and Linux. This is representative rather than exhaustive. On the quality side we work in Cucumber, RestAssured, and Selenium or Playwright, against PostgreSQL with the Atlassian suite for tracking.

You do not need experience with every technology in our environment. We hire for competencies over pedigree, so if you have built similar systems and learn quickly, we encourage you to apply.

Minimum Work Experience: 7+ years in quality assurance with a strong automation focus

Minimum Education: Bachelor's in Computer Science or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience

Benefits and Perks of working for Cboe Global Markets

We value the total wellbeing of our people - including health, financial, personal and social wellness. We believe standard benefits like health insurance and fair pay are a given at any organization. Still, you should know we offer:

  • Fair and competitive salary and incentive compensation packages with an upside for overachievement
  • Generous paid time off, including vacation, personal days, sick days and annual community service days
  • Flexible, hybrid work environment
  • Health, dental and vision benefits, including access to telemedicine and mental health services 2:1 401(k) match, up to 8% match immediately upon hire
  • Discounted Employee Stock Purchase Plan
  • Tax Savings Accounts for health, dependent and transportation
  • Employee referral bonus program
  • Volunteer opportunities to help you give back to your communities


Some of our associates' favorite benefits and perks include:

  • Complimentary lunch, snacks and coffee in any Cboe office
  • Paid tuition assistance and education opportunities
  • Generous charitable giving company match
  • Paid parental leave and fertility benefits
  • On-site gyms and discounts to other fitness centers


Salary Ranges (applicable for US locations only)
At Cboe, we are committed to providing a competitive, transparent, and market-informed total rewards program. The anticipated base salary range for this role is $121,550-$157,300, with actual compensation determined by job-related factors such as skills, relevant experience, education, internal alignment, and location.

This role may also be eligible for annual incentive compensation and, where applicable, participation in Cboe's long-term equity programs.

Additional information about Cboe's total rewards program, including benefits and other compensation components, can be found here: Total Rewards at CBOE.

Any communication from Cboe regarding this position will only come from a Cboe recruiter who has a @cboe.com email or via LinkedIn Recruiter. Cboe does not use any other third party communication tools for recruiting purposes.

About Chicago Board Options Exchange

The Chicago Board Options Exchange, located at 433 West Van Buren Street in Chicago, is the largest U.S. options exchange with an annual trading volume of around 1.27 billion at the end of 2014. CBOE offers options on over 2,200 companies, 22 stock indices, and 140 exchange-traded funds. The Chicago Board of Trade established the Chicago Board Options Exchange in 1973. The first exchange to list standardized, exchange-traded stock options began its first day of trading on April 26, 1973, in celebration of the 125th birthday of the Chicago Board of Trade. The CBOE is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and owned by Cboe Global Markets.
Learn more about Chicago Board Options Exchange
Industry
Founded
1973

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