Test Architect Principal
Cigna Group · Newton, Massachusetts, United States
PBM Test Architect Principal
Enterprise Test Strategy, Architecture & Quality Governance
Job Description
PBM Test Architect Principal will serve as the senior technical authority for end-to-end testing strategy, quality architecture, and release-readiness evidence across the New PBM Platform program. The role defines the test framework spanning the New PBM Platform, retained and modernized ESI systems, enterprise integrations, and client re-implementation activities. Working across both the build of new capability and the integration and re-implementation of existing systems, this Principal will establish common standards for test scope, sequencing, automation, data, environments, evidence, and readiness criteria so that quality decisions are consistent across the full delivery lifecycle.
This role partners with the Build Quality Lead, Integration and End-to-End Test Lead, PBM Test Lead, PBS Test Lead , platform and product engineering, enterprise architecture, delivery, security, infrastructure, and business readiness teams. The Principal provides direction on the most complex quality and testing matters, resolves issues with limited organizational precedent, and translates technical risk into clear recommendations for senior leaders and release-governance forums.
Core Responsibilities Include
Test Strategy & Architecture
- Define and maintain the program’s end-to-end test strategy, architecture, operating model, and multi-year quality roadmap.
- Establish standards for unit, contract, integration, end-to-end, regression, performance, resilience, security, data-conversion, migration, and operational-readiness testing.
- Define the release ladder, entry and exit criteria, evidence standards, sign-off expectations, and traceability requirements used across every delivery team in the program.
- Create reusable testing patterns and reference architectures that support platform scale, frequent releases, and successive client waves.
- Ensure test architecture aligns with enterprise architecture, security, privacy, compliance, environment, and data-handling requirements.
Quality Governance & Readiness
- Provide technical governance for quality decisions and independently assess whether test evidence supports progression through readiness gates.
- Establish quality scorecards, risk indicators, defect measures, and executive reporting that present a clear view of release and migration readiness.
- Define severity, triage, root-cause, risk-acceptance, and exception-management practices across the program.
- Identify systemic quality risks and drive corrective actions that improve prevention, detection, and recovery.
- Advise leaders on quality tradeoffs, unresolved risks, and the evidence required for go/no-go decisions.
Automation, Test Data & AI-Assisted Quality
- Own the test automation strategy for the program, covering framework and tooling selection, the balance of coverage from unit through end-to-end, pipeline integration, and the standards that keep automation maintainable as the platform changes.
- Define the test data strategy, including synthetic data generation, masking and de-identification of production-derived data, provisioning and refresh models across shared environments, and the controls that keep PHI and client data handled appropriately.
- Define how testing is performed within an AI-assisted software development lifecycle (AI-SDLC), including the use of AI-generated tests, test data, and defect analysis, the human review required before generated assets are trusted, and how traceability back to requirements is preserved.
- Establish the evidence automation approach so readiness evidence is produced as a byproduct of the pipeline rather than assembled by hand.
- Set the standard for what good automation looks like, including stability and flakiness thresholds, execution time, and the decision rules for when a manual test remains the right answer.
Cross-Program Technical Leadership
- Partner with the Build Quality Lead to ensure in-factory testing executes against the program strategy and quality bar.
- Partner with the Integration and End-to-End Test Lead to ensure cross-estate and client-wave testing produces complete, reliable evidence.
- Set direction for the PBM Test Lead on testing of new platform capability, confirming that in-factory coverage, automation, and evidence meet the program standard before capability leaves the build teams.
- Set direction for the PBS Test Lead on testing across the existing estate, confirming that regression of current systems, integration across both estates, and client-wave testing produce evidence that holds at the readiness gate.
- Convene the PBM and PBS Test Leads on a standing cadence to resolve seam issues, including shared environments, test data spanning both estates, defect ownership when a failure crosses the boundary, and whose schedule wins when test windows collide.
- Align platform, product, integration, migration, and business testing into one coherent strategy and sequence.
- Mentor architects, engineers, and quality professionals and elevate test engineering capability across the program.
- Evaluate emerging testing tools and techniques and make the adoption call where they measurably improve quality, cycle time, or cost of testing.
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.
Critical Technology Competencies
- Deep expertise in enterprise test architecture, quality engineering, automation strategy, and software-delivery controls.
- Experience designing test approaches for complex distributed platforms, APIs, event-driven integrations, data pipelines, and legacy-modern ecosystems.
- Strong knowledge of performance, scalability, resilience, disaster recovery, security, accessibility, and other non-functional testing disciplines.
- Experience with test data management, environment strategy, service virtualization, observability, CI/CD integration, and evidence automation.
- Ability to assess emerging testing tools and AI-enabled techniques while maintaining appropriate security, privacy, compliance, and validation controls.
- 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 failures such as CloudWatch and X-Ray.
- Depth in test automation tooling across layers, such as Playwright, Selenium, or Cypress at the interface level, REST Assured, Karate, or Postman at the API level, and JUnit, TestNG, or pytest at the unit and component level, with the judgment to standardize rather than accumulate frameworks.
- Experience with performance and resilience tooling such as JMeter, Gatling, k6, or LoadRunner, and with contract testing and service virtualization such as Pact, WireMock, or commercial equivalents.
- Experience with test data management tooling such as Delphix, Informatica TDM, GenRocket, or Tonic, including masking, subsetting, and synthetic generation