Manager Software Engineering - Test Automation

Career Area:

Job Description:

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.

When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other.  We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it.

Caterpillar: Confidential Green
Manager – Test Automation (Frameworks, Tools & Innovation)
Role Summary
The Manager – Test Automation is responsible for defining and driving the enterprise-wide test automation strategy across multiple teams and products. This role is focused on building a best-in-class automation organization, owning automation platforms and frameworks, enabling continuous testing, and driving innovation. The role partners closely with Engineering, DevOps, Architecture, and Product leaders to ensure scalable, reliable, and high-impact quality outcomes.
Key Responsibilities
• Lead and manage multiple automation teams through people managers and senior technical leaders. • Define and evolve the automation operating model, career paths, hiring standards, and skill development plans. • Own the enterprise automation platform including frameworks, tooling, execution strategy, and governance. • Drive standardization of automation frameworks across UI, API, integration, and mobile testing. • Ensure automation frameworks are modular, maintainable, scalable, and CI/CD ready with container-based execution. • Establish continuous testing practices with strong shift-left and quality gate enforcement. • Partner with DevOps to integrate automation into build and release pipelines. • Drive automation reliability, reducing flakiness and improving execution stability and speed. • Own release readiness, test coverage strategy, defect triage governance, and quality metrics. • Champion innovation in test automation including AI-assisted testing, codeless approaches, and advanced analytics. • Define and track KPIs such as automation coverage, defect leakage, execution reliability, cycle time reduction, and ROI. • Communicate quality insights, risks, and outcomes to senior leadership and stakeholders.
Automation Platform & Framework Ownership
• Design, govern, and evolve enterprise-grade automation frameworks. • Ensure support for tagging, suite segmentation, intelligent reporting, and failure classification. • Drive framework modernization for performance, maintainability, and scalability. • Enable parallel and distributed execution across environments.
Caterpillar: Confidential Green
CI/CD & DevOps Enablement
• Embed automated testing into CI/CD pipelines with clear quality gates.
• Enable development teams with regression suites for early defect detection.
• Standardize pipeline reporting and automation health dashboards.
Reliability, Performance & Non-Functional Testing
• Drive automation stability and flakiness control.
• Partner with performance engineering teams to integrate NFR validation into automation
pipelines.
• Ensure proactive detection of performance and reliability regressions.
Innovation & Continuous Improvement
• Define and execute a quality engineering innovation roadmap.
• Evaluate and adopt AI-assisted test creation, maintenance, and failure analysis where
valuable.
• Drive continuous improvement through tooling enhancements, accelerators, and reusable
assets.
Required Technical Skills
• Deep expertise in test automation frameworks such as Selenium, Playwright, RestAssured,
and Robot Framework.
• Strong programming experience in Java and one or more of Python or TypeScript.
• Strong understanding of automation design patterns such as POM and BDD.
• Experience integrating automation with CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong API automation expertise and test strategy design.
Leadership & Soft Skills
• Proven experience leading managers and large, distributed automation teams.
• Strong stakeholder management and executive communication skills.
• Ability to balance quality risk with delivery velocity.
• Data-driven mindset with strong analytical and decision-making skills.
Experience & Qualifications
• 12–18+ years of experience in Quality Engineering and Test Automation.
• 6+ years in technical leadership roles with experience managing managers.
• Proven success building and scaling enterprise automation platforms.
• Experience working in complex, multi-application, cloud-based environments.

Posting Dates:

Caterpillar is an Equal Opportunity Employer.  Qualified applicants of any age are encouraged to apply

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