Director of Test Engineering
Pivotal Commware
Quality Assurance
Bothell, WA, USA
Posted on Thursday, September 28, 2023
Pivotal Commware develops 5G communications platforms, systems and applications based on Holographic Beam Forming® , a patented breakthrough in electromagnetic physics. HBF allows Pivotal to create software-defined antennas that can harness, shape and direct radio waves with order-of magnitude advantages over legacy beamforming systems in cost, size, weight and power consumption (C-SWaP). HBF enables mobile network operators to maximize capacity, coverage and throughput on demand and is recognized as an essential element in the 5G ecosystem. 5G leadership is pivotal to the US economy, and 5G is Pivotal™.
Pivotal has product lines including the Echo 5G, Pivot 5G, cloud-based Intelligent Beam Management System, and WaveScape. As Pivotal continues to grow, we are seeking a Director of Test Engineering to lead our test team. The Director will have responsibility for pulling together Pivotal’s impressive individual contributors and managers into a single test organization. You will be leading teams responsible for hardware test; RF test; embedded software test; cloud software test; and system integration and verification.
The Director must be able to motivate, grow, and instill best practices across the entire test, integration, and verification team. You should be fanatically focused on quality, serving as a counterbalance to the development team. You will need to make frequent judgment calls on when to lean into manual testing vs automation, to keep deliveries on schedule without sacrificing quality. You will work closely with teams through Pivotal, including the Field Deployment team; Product Managers; the entire engineering organization; and 3rd party companies, like our manufacturing partners. This position reports to the VP of Engineering. This is a hybrid position with a minimum requirement of being present one day per week in the Bothell, WA office.
Responsibilities
- Attract, recruit, and retain top talent while setting priorities and direction for your team
- Lead teams of RF, hardware, software, and system test engineers to validate and verify performance of Pivotal’s wireless products
- Instill best practices in the test team to specify and document test plans, derived from product and system requirements
- Inspire the team to act as an independent arbiter of quality
- Constantly weigh and decide when to focus on automation vs manual testing
- Coach your managers and individual contributors to continuously improve dashboard and result reporting, whether the audience is a Design Engineer or the CTO
- Develop, maintain, and extend test automation infrastructure (code and hardware!)
- Quickly analyze Pivotal’s existing test suites, including regression; develop a plan to improve; and then execute
- Divide responsibilities among the different engineers on your team to maximize efficiency throughout development, launch, and maintenance of Pivotal’s products; avoid redundant testing, smooth out the handoffs between teams, and work alongside Systems Engineers and Product Managers to ensure sufficient test coverage
- Determine strategic goals for your organization, present them to the Executive team, and then execute them
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor of engineering (BEng) or Bachelor of science (BSc) in Computer Science, Engineering or related
- 5 years of experience as an individual contributor (Test Engineer, SDET, Test Automation, or other similar job titles)
- 5 years of additional experience leading test teams in one or more of embedded software, hardware, RF, and system integration. You need to have touched hardware at some point: cloud software only is not sufficient!
- Experience with control of devices and test equipment, such as Arduinos, CellAdvisor, spectrum analyzers, oscilloscopes, signal generators, protocol analyzers, vector network analyzers, power meters, or similar
- Experienced with using automated frameworks
- Familiar with build, CI/CD, and source control tools such as Jenkins, Git, Bitbucket, Jira, Artifactory
- Experience using TCP/IP networking tools such as Wireshark or Nmap
- Excellent communications skills and ability to work across fast-paced, diverse engineering teams
- Ability to work in a fast-paced environment with challenging deadlines
- Eligible to work in the US
Desired Qualifications
- MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or related
- Fluent in Python
- Experience implementing automation frameworks including hardware
- Experience in the wireless telecommunication industry (LTE, 5G)
- Experience using standard communication protocols such as SPI, UART, I2C, USB, Ethernet, Bluetooth, and similar
- Experience with cellular debug tools and equipment such as QXDM, XCAL/XCAP, Viavi analyzers, and similar
- Knowledge of embedded Linux
- Familiar with testing secure systems, from secure boot through IPSEC
- Familiar with 3GPP specifications, PTCRB, GCF, O-RAN, and other cellular standards
Pivotal was named among Washington’s Top 100 Places to Work in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 & 2022.
At Pivotal you will join a team experienced in advanced communications, RAN system development and deployment, commercial antenna’s, RF design, cloud-based management software and machine learning. If you want to apply yourself to this fascinating endeavor, then we would love to hear from you!
Pivotal is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We respect and seek to empower each individual and support the diverse cultures, perspectives, skills, and experiences within our workforce.