Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) — Enterprise Technology Services

Apple; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Apple is seeking a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) to help build an enterprise PIM platform for PLM across hardware, software, and services. You will collaborate with business stakeholders to validate complex, large-scale systems and drive quality across on-premise and cloud deployments.

The role emphasizes automation, modular test architectures in TypeScript, and rigorous testing of asynchronous and distributed components within the IS&T group.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of QA or software engineering experience in enterprise systems.
• Experience designing and implementing test plans and automation strategies for full-stack apps.
• Proficient in browser-based test automation with Playwright, Selenium, or equivalent.
• Experience with PLM-like enterprise apps and distributed systems testing.
• Strong TypeScript programming, APIs, and JSON Schema validation.

Responsibilities

• Partner with engineering and program management to define testable acceptance criteria.
• Lead automation architecture in TypeScript and Playwright; ensure quality gates.
• Champion test code quality with strict TS config, linting, and PR reviews.
• Apply test pyramid; push coverage to unit/service layers, reserve UI for critical flows.
• Develop service virtualization and data management for repeatable tests.

Skills

Quality assurance

Test automation

TypeScript

Playwright

Selenium

Distributed systems

API testing

SQL

CI/CD

Tools

Playwright

WireMock

Jenkins

Rio

Allure

Job description

Summary

Do you want to help build some of the largest and most consequential enterprise and customer technology systems in the world? Join Apple's Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization. IS&T is the engine behind everything Apple does for customers and for the people who build for them. It's Apple's central nervous system. Supporting 2.5 billion active Apple devices, processing billions of secure transactions, and keeping the technology that defines modern life running flawlessly, IS&T makes the impossible feel effortless. Do you love building solutions to handle global complexity and immense scale? Imagine what you could do here. The IS&T Enterprise Business Application group is seeking a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) with a proven track record of sustaining high-quality enterprise software solutions. Our group owns Apple's enterprise Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) transformation initiative - delivering a next-generation Product Information Management (PIM) platform that drives Apple's product innovation across hardware, software, and services lines of business. In this position, you will work closely with key business stakeholders to build an enterprise PIM platform that enables product innovation and collaboration across Apple's product value chain. We are looking for someone with extensive experience building and delivering large-scale, on-premise and cloud-based enterprise solutions - especially PLM. This individual should have sound technical and functional knowledge of PLM domains and modern test frameworks. A great candidate will create a collaborative work environment that fosters autonomy, transparency, innovation, and learning.

Description

Collaboration & Engineering Partnership

• Partner with engineering, infrastructure, site reliability, program management, and partner technical and business teams to formulate engineering specifications and testable acceptance criteria.
• Participate in design and architecture reviews as the quality voice - surface testability gaps, missing observability, and risky integration points before a line of code is written.
• Act as the quality advocate in agile ceremonies: refine stories into verifiable behaviors, estimate test effort, and hold the team's definition of done.

Test Strategy, Design & Automation

• Craft test plans, test cases, and the associated automation for complex full-stack PLM workflows; set standards, estimate effort, and coordinate execution across functional, integration, regression, and release cycles.
• Own the automation architecture in TypeScript: build and maintain a strictly typed, reusable, data-driven UI and API test framework on Playwright Test - custom fixtures, page- and service-object layering, shared typed clients, parallel sharded execution, and no flaky tests tolerated.
• Treat test code as production code: strict TypeScript configuration, lint and format gates, typed API contracts generated from schema rather than hand-written, and peer-reviewed pull requests.
• Apply the test pyramid deliberately - push coverage down to unit and service layers, and reserve end-to-end UI suites for genuine business-critical journeys.
• Build service-virtualization and mocking capability (Playwright network interception and WireMock stubs) so downstream integrations can be tested without waiting on partner environments.
• Engineer test data management for PLM: item/BOM/change-order fixtures, revision and lifecycle states, seeded via API or ITK/SOA rather than hand-built in the UI; guarantee repeatable setup and teardown.

Asynchronous & Distributed Systems Testing

• Automate and validate asynchronous, event-driven, and distributed behavior - message queues and streams (Kafka), workflow engines, scheduled jobs, and batch/ETL pipelines.
• Write deterministic assertions over eventual consistency: typed polling helpers with bounded waits and expect.poll-style retries, idempotency and replay checks, out-of-order and duplicate message handling, and dead-letter/retry paths - never sleep-based waits.
• Verify data integrity end to end across system boundaries - reconciliation between source PLM, the PIM platform, and downstream consumers, including migration and cutover validation.

CI/CD & Quality Engineering Infrastructure

• Integrate automated suites into CI/CD (Jenkins and Rio) so every commit and every deployment is gated by meaningful, fast, trustworthy feedback; manage the toolchain, dependency hygiene, and build caching that keeps those runs fast.
• Manage on-demand, isolated test environments so suites can run in parallel without contention.
• Maintain reporting and traceability - Playwright traces and Allure dashboards, requirement-to-test coverage mapping, and clear triage of every failure as product bug, test bug, or environment issue.

Non-Functional & Resilience Testing

• Design and execute performance, load, and soak tests for large BOM structures, bulk imports, and peak concurrent usage; define and defend latency and throughput budgets.
• Validate security and access control: role- and project-based permissions, data segregation, authentication/SSO flows, and audit trails - critical in a system holding unreleased product data.
• Cover accessibility, cross-browser, and cross-platform behavior for the PIM user experience.

Defect Management & Quality Metrics

• Identify and document defects with crisp reproduction steps, evidence, and impact; collaborate with stakeholders to prioritize and drive resolution.
• Engage with stakeholders to define and consistently assess metrics that monitor product quality - automation coverage and pass rate, escaped-defect rate, mean time to detect and repair, regression cycle time, and environment stability.
• Drive root-cause analysis on escaped defects and convert every one into a durable automated test.

Minimum Qualifications

• Minimum of 5 years of professional experience in quality assurance or software engineering.
• Proficient in developing test plans and automation strategies for intricate full-stack applications.
• Experience testing and automating browser-based applications across platforms using Playwright (TypeScript), Selenium, or equivalent.
• Experience testing and automating enterprise applications such as Siemens Teamcenter or an equivalent PLM system.
• Hands-on experience automating and testing asynchronous and distributed systems.
• Strong programming ability in TypeScript - typed interfaces and generics, async/await, clean code practices, code review, and Git-based workflows. Our automation codebase is TypeScript end to end, with Java used on the services and integrations under test.
• Experience with API and contract testing (REST/SOAP, JSON/XML) using Playwright's API request client, Postman/Insomnia, or equivalent, including JSON Schema validation.
• Working knowledge of SQL for test data setup and backend verification.
• Experience integrating automated test suites into a CI/CD pipeline.

Preferred Qualifications

• Depth in the Playwright Test ecosystem - custom fixtures, projects and sharding, network interception, trace viewer, visual comparison, and component testing.
• Extensive knowledge of back-end development technologies, particularly Java and related frameworks (Spring/Spring Boot, microservices) - enough to read the services under test and debug alongside their developers.
• Working knowledge of browser technologies and frameworks such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and React, including the DOM and accessibility semantics that make an application testable.
• Proficiency in relational database technologies such as Oracle or Postgres.
• Depth in Siemens Teamcenter - Active Workspace, BMIDE data model, SOA/ITK services, workflows, and Teamcenter Integration Framework (TcIF).
• Experience with PLM data migration and cutover validation - extract, transform, load, and reconciliation at scale.
• Experience with message brokers and streaming platforms (Kafka via kafkajs, JMS/ActiveMQ) and with ETL or data pipeline testing.
• Experience with performance and resilience testing of enterprise workloads.
• Familiarity with test management and defect tracking practices, including requirement-to-test traceability and Allure-based reporting.
• Self-motivated, proactive, and meticulous individual with excellent written and oral English communication skills.