Principal Test Automation Engineer

Job Title

Principal Test Automation Engineer

Role Summary

Lead the technical direction and implementation of AI-enabled automation across the software development lifecycle, from build and CI through testing and release. Work on a codebase that includes a kernel compiler, firmware, device drivers, and an inference serving stack running on proprietary silicon.

This is a hands-on leadership role: you will build core automation foundations, integrations, guardrails, and evaluation methods, ship complex components yourself, and raise engineering practices across teams.

Experience Level

Senior (Principal-level). No explicit years-of-experience requirement specified.

Responsibilities

Primary technical and delivery responsibilities for AI-enabled quality engineering and workflow automation.

• Define technical direction for AI-enabled workflow automation across build, CI, test, and release.
• Design and implement the agent harness and integrations with GitLab, Jira, test results, logs, and observability systems.
• Develop evaluation methods to measure time savings and correctness preservation for automation.
• Define guardrails and standards for autonomous AI actions, human-in-loop decisions, auditability, and change traceability.
• Deliver automation features such as cross-layer failure attribution, failure clustering and defect deduplication, coverage-gap analysis, and release-readiness summaries.
• Provide shared patterns, lead design reviews, mentor engineers, and set cross-team technical direction.
• Decide and justify when to use agents, deterministic tools, or simple scripts; document those patterns for the organization.

Requirements

Must-have technical skills and production experience; preferred items listed separately.

• Extensive production software engineering experience with strong Python skills.
• Practical familiarity with Rust and/or C++ sufficient to understand build flows and diagnose compiler errors.
• Proven experience shipping AI-enabled tools or automation used in production (beyond demos).
• Deep hands-on experience with LLM APIs, agent harnesses, tool integration, and context engineering.
• Experience designing evaluations for nondeterministic systems to demonstrate improvements without regressions.
• Strong fluency across CI/CD, testing, and release processes and sound judgment about when to use AI.
• Track record of setting technical direction across teams that do not report to you.

Nice-to-have:

• Exposure to compilers, firmware, or hardware-in-the-loop test environments.
• Experience building tool integrations with MCP or similar protocols.
• Experience with GitLab, Jira, or Prometheus APIs.
• Experience managing cost and latency in LLM-based systems.
• Regular use of AI coding tools (e.g., Copilot, Claude Code) with practical opinions on their applicability.

Education Requirements

Not specified.

About the Company

Company: d-Matrix

Headquarters: Santa Clara, California, United States

d-Matrix is a Santa Clara–based startup developing highly programmable in-memory computing architectures and accompanying software to accelerate generative AI and other AI workloads, focusing on hardware-software co-design for cloud and edge applications.