Your Responsibilities

As a Staff Test Infrastructure Engineer for John Deere located in Santa Clara, CA, you will:

• Own, maintain, and extend automated test infrastructure for an autonomous tractor fleet (test frameworks, test runners, pipeline orchestration, and result reporting).
• Develop and improve test case authoring, execution, and post-run validation tooling.
• Integrate new simulators with the robotics and perception software stack, ensuring realistic and repeatable test scenarios.
• Support CI/CD pipelines for simulated and replay-based testing, including defining test suites, managing test configurations, and ensuring deterministic automated execution.
• Maintain and administer test bench hardware, including compute platforms, sensor rigs, and HIL (Hardware-in-the-Loop) setups; troubleshoot hardware and connectivity issues.
• Monitor nightly and weekly builds, triage test failures, identify root causes, and report issues to the appropriate engineering teams with clear reproduction steps and context.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with autonomy, perception, navigation, and DevOps engineers to ensure test coverage tracks product changes.
• Improve test observability by enhancing logging, metrics collection, S3-based artifact storage, and result dashboards.
• Author and maintain documentation for test processes, infrastructure setup, and onboarding guides for other engineers contributing tests.

VISA Sponsorship is NOT available for this position

What Skills You Need

• 6 or more years of experience in test automation, test infrastructure engineering
• Strong proficiency in Python (test frameworks, scripting, YAML-driven configuration, CLI tooling).
• Experience with CI/CD systems (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or similar) and building/maintaining automated pipelines.
• Familiarity with Docker and containerized development/test environments.
• Experience with Linux system administration and shell scripting (bash).
• Experience with hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) or software-in-the-loop (SIL) testing concepts.
• Experience with version control (Git) and collaborative development workflows. 

What Makes You Stand Out

• Ability to read and understand C++ and/or ROS 2 codebases sufficiently to triage build and test failures.
• Experience with ROS / ROS 2 (topics, nodes, launch files, bag recording/playback).
• Familiarity with robotics simulation tools (e.g., Gazebo, CARLA, NVIDIA Isaac Sim, or proprietary simulators).
• Experience with perception or autonomy stacks (sensor fusion, object detection, path planning).
• Familiarity with protobuf / gRPC messaging and serialization.
• Experience with AWS services (S3, EC2, ECS/EKS) for cloud-based test execution or artifact management.
• Experience with MCAP / rosbag data formats and replay-based regression testing.
• Familiarity with embedded systems, CAN bus, or vehicle/machine platforms.
• Experience maintaining or administering NVIDIA Jetson or GPU-accelerated compute platforms.
• Exposure to TensorRT model optimization or ML model deployment pipelines.
• Experience with test result visualization and reporting tools (e.g., Allure, Grafana, custom dashboards).
• Experience in test automation using PyTest 
• Strong debugging and root-cause analysis skills; comfortable investigating failures across software and hardware boundaries.

Education

Ideally, you will have a degree or equivalent related work experience in the following:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related technical field.
• Relevant certifications (e.g., AWS, Kubernetes/Docker, ROS) are a plus.