Senior Associate - Quality Engineer, AI & Automation

Location Designation: Hybrid - 3 days per week

Role Overview

New York Life is seeking a Senior Associate, Quality Engineer to help build modern, automation-first quality practices across our Wealth Management technology platforms. This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who can code, understand the business, challenge designs, and use AI-enabled tooling to improve how quality is built into software from the first requirement through production release.

This is not a manual testing role. The right candidate will design and build automated test frameworks, review developer unit test strategies, improve CI/CD quality gates, analyze defect patterns, and partner with engineers and product owners to make systems more testable, observable, resilient, and business-ready.

You will work across advisor, client, account, portfolio, transaction, data, integration, and reporting workflows that support wealth management outcomes in a regulated financial services environment. The role requires enough business fluency to know where quality risk hides: in account data, householding, balances, holdings, transactions, suitability-sensitive workflows, integrations, reports, and downstream advisor/client experiences.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and maintain automated test suites across API, UI, integration, data, regression, and end-to-end workflows.
• Write clean, maintainable automation code using modern engineering practices, including reusable libraries, test utilities, fixtures, mocks, service virtualization, and test data management.
• Use AI and GenAI-enabled tools to accelerate test design, coverage analysis, defect triage, test data generation, regression optimization, and failure pattern detection.
• Partner with software engineers to review unit test strategy, code coverage, edge-case coverage, mocks/stubs, contract tests, and test results before code moves downstream.
• Participate in design and architecture reviews to improve testability, observability, reliability, determinism, data validation, resiliency, and operational supportability.
• Build automation into CI/CD pipelines so quality signals are fast, visible, repeatable, and actionable.
• Develop automated quality gates for pull requests, builds, deployments, APIs, data contracts, and release readiness.
• Analyze recurring defects and production incidents to identify systemic quality gaps and drive root-cause prevention.
• Create dashboards and reporting that show meaningful quality health: automation coverage, failure trends, flaky tests, escaped defects, regression duration, release confidence, and risk hotspots.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, Architecture, DevSecOps, Release Management, and business stakeholders to define test strategy for complex wealth management features.
• Translate business scenarios into automation coverage that reflects how advisors, clients, operations teams, and downstream systems actually use the platform.
• Help raise the engineering bar by mentoring peers on automation design, test strategy, AI-assisted quality practices, and quality-by-design thinking.

AI & Technical Expectations

The ideal candidate should be comfortable using AI as an engineering accelerator—not as magic dust sprinkled on stale test cases.

Expected hands-on capabilities include:

• Applying GenAI tools responsibly to generate, refactor, review, and maintain automation code.
• Using AI to summarize failures, cluster defects, detect flaky tests, identify regression risk, and improve coverage.
• Understanding prompt design, evaluation, reproducibility, privacy constraints, and human review when using AI in a regulated environment.
• Building or integrating automation utilities that leverage LLMs, embeddings, or intelligent heuristics where appropriate.
• Validating AI-assisted outputs rather than blindly trusting them.
• Working with APIs, SQL/data validation, CI/CD pipelines, source control, test frameworks, and cloud or containerized environments.

What Success Looks Like

• Increased automated coverage across high-value wealth management workflows.
• Reduced reliance on manual regression testing.
• Faster feedback to developers through CI/CD-integrated quality gates.
• Better unit, API, integration, and end-to-end test strategies.
• Fewer escaped defects and less defect recurrence.
• Cleaner architecture decisions because testability and operability are considered earlier.
• Improved visibility into quality health, release risk, and automation value.
• Business partners trust the quality signals because the automation reflects real advisor and client workflows.

What You’ll Bring

• 3+ years of hands-on experience in quality engineering, software engineering, SDET, or test automation roles.
• Direct experience in wealth management, brokerage, advisory, asset management, insurance/annuity platforms, or closely related financial services technology.
• Strong coding ability in at least one modern language, preferably Python, Java, JavaScript, or TypeScript.
• Experience building automated tests using tools and frameworks such as pytest, Selenium, mabl, Playwright, Cypress, REST Assured, Postman/Newman, Cucumber/BDD, JUnit, TestNG, or equivalent.
• Strong API testing experience, including REST services, schema validation, contract testing, negative testing, authentication, authorization, and integration flows.
• Working knowledge of SQL and data validation, including reconciliation-style testing across systems, files, APIs, databases, and reports.
• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or equivalent.
• Familiarity with Git, pull requests, branching strategies, code reviews, and software engineering SDLC practices.
• Ability to review developer unit test strategies and identify missing scenarios, weak assertions, poor mocks, inadequate boundary testing, and fragile coverage.
• Understanding of quality patterns for distributed systems, including observability, logging, monitoring, resilience, retries, idempotency, data contracts, and environment stability.
• Experience using AI-enabled developer tools, test generation tools, or LLM-based productivity tools to improve engineering delivery.
• Strong analytical skills and the ability to turn defect trends, test failures, and business risk into practical engineering action.
• Clear communication skills with the ability to explain technical quality risks to engineers, product owners, and business partners.

Preferred Qualifications

• ISTQB Foundation, ISTQB Advanced Test Automation Engineer, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with wealth management workflows such as client onboarding, account opening, advisor desktop tools, portfolio management, holdings, balances, transactions, managed accounts, performance reporting, financial planning, or custodial integrations.
• Experience with cloud platforms, containers, service virtualization, test data automation, or ephemeral test environments.
• Experience with contract testing tools such as Pact or OpenAPI-based validation.
• Familiarity with observability tools such as Splunk, Datadog, Dynatrace, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or similar.
• Experience testing AI-enabled applications, including model output validation, guardrail testing, regression evaluation, and auditability.
• Exposure to regulated financial services controls, including data privacy, auditability, access control, and release governance.

Why This Role Matters

Quality in wealth management is not cosmetic. A missed field, stale holding, broken integration, or incorrect account balance can erode trust fast. This role helps New York Life deliver software with confidence by making quality part of the engineering fabric—not a checkpoint at the end of the road.

You will help move the organization to intelligent, automated, AI-accelerated quality engineering. The work is hands-on, technical, and business-critical. The payoff is simple: faster delivery, fewer surprises, and platforms that advisors and clients can trust.

Pay Transparency

Salary Range: $81,000-$115,500

Overtime eligible: Exempt

Discretionary bonus eligible: Yes

Sales bonus eligible: No

Actual base salary will be determined based on several factors but not limited to individual’s experience, skills, qualifications, and job location. Additionally, employees are eligible for an annual discretionary bonus. In addition to base salary, employees may also be eligible to participate in an incentive program.

Company Overview

At New York Life, our 180-year legacy of purpose and integrity fuels our future. As we evolve into a more technology-, data-, and AI-enabled organization, we remain grounded in the values that drive lasting impact.

Our diverse business portfolio creates opportunities to make a difference across industries and communities—inviting bold thinking, collaborative problem-solving, and purpose-driven innovation. Here, you’ll find the rare balance of long-standing stability and forward momentum, supported by an inclusive team that honors tradition while embracing progress.

As a Fortune 100 mutual company, we offer a place to grow your skills, contribute to meaningful work, and deliver solutions that matter. Your ideas drive what’s next, and your growth powers it.

Our Benefits

We provide a full package of benefits for employees – and have unique offerings for a modern workforce, including leave programs, adoption assistance, and student loan repayment programs. Based on feedback from our employees, we continue to refine and add benefits to our offering, so that you can flourish both inside and outside of work. Click here to discover more about our comprehensive benefit options or visit our NYL Benefits Site.

Our Commitment to Inclusion
At New York Life, fostering an inclusive workplace is fundamental to who we are and how we serve our communities. We have a longstanding commitment to creating an environment where individuals can contribute their best and succeed together. This foundation is rooted in our core values of humanity and integrity, ensuring that every employee feels valued and supported. By embracing a broad range of perspectives and experiences, we achieve greater success and fulfill our promise of providing financial security and peace of mind to families across all communities. Click here to learn more about New York Life’s leadership in this space.​

Recognized as one of Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies, New York Life is committed to improving local communities through a culture of employee giving and volunteerism, supported by the Foundation. We're proud that due to our mutuality, we operate in the best interests of our policy owners. To learn more about career opportunities at New York Life, please visit the Careers page of www.NewYorkLife.com.

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Job Requisition ID: 94490