Principal Engineer & AI Lead, Quality Engineering"

About this role

8448 - Virginia - Remote CES - Remote, Richmond, Virginia, 23218 CarMax, the way your career should be! 

Position Overview

As a Principal Engineer, Quality, you will serve as a Quality Engineering lead within CarMax's Product and Technology organization, driving CarMax's quality engineering strategy to ensure only thoroughly tested, high-performing software reaches production. This role is critical to delivering a flawless customer experience and driving innovation across CarMax's in-store applications. You will design robust automation frameworks, mentor teams, and influence quality practices across multiple Agile development streams, while also serving as a key contributor driving AI-powered testing and automation innovation across the organization. This position ensures scalable and efficient testing solutions that align with CarMax's commitment to excellence.

Why CarMax? At CarMax, we are the nation's largest retailer of used cars with stores from coast to coast, and we are still growing. We're rethinking the way people buy cars – and it's our associates that help us do just that. We believe work should feel meaningful and rewarding, with opportunities to make an impact every day. This is where innovation meets passion – be inspired and supported to take us to the future.

Team Overview You'll join the Quality Engineering organization, serving as a lead contributor and trusted advisor for automation and testing best practices. This role requires collaboration across multiple teams to establish quality standards, implement advanced testing strategies, and drive continuous improvement in software delivery.

Role Responsibilities • Lead and mentor organization-wide test automation efforts, ensuring best practices and scalability. • Create and implement test strategies for multiple teams, focusing on automation and efficiency. • Drive modern testing methodologies to shift testing left and improve development workflows. • Develop and report key quality metrics to stakeholders for transparency and accountability. • Design and build testing infrastructure and integrations for regression and integration testing. • Manage bug triage processes, prioritize issues, and oversee resolution of critical defects. • Evaluate and introduce new tools and methods to enhance automation productivity across the enterprise. • Serve as a key contributor to the AI engineering vision and roadmap for Quality Engineering, helping architect how agentic and generative AI capabilities are embedded across the test automation ecosystem enterprise-wide. • Architect and productionize AI-driven testing systems—including autonomous test generation, self-healing automation frameworks, intelligent defect triage, and predictive quality/risk analytics—that materially reduce manual test maintenance and accelerate release velocity. • Direct cross-functional integration of LLM- and agent-based systems (e.g., MCP-based agents, RAG pipelines, autonomous test agents) into CI/CD and QE workflows, setting technical direction for engineering and data partners. • Define enterprise governance, evaluation, and risk frameworks for AI adoption in testing—covering model reliability, data privacy, hallucination mitigation, and human-in-the-loop validation—and represent Quality Engineering in enterprise AI governance forums. • Evangelize and upskill the broader engineering organization on AI-augmented quality practices, positioning CarMax's QE function as an internal center of excellence for applied AI in software delivery.

Required Qualifications • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field with 7+ years of experience, or Master's degree with 5+ years of experience. • 8+ years of experience in Quality Engineering with expertise in automation frameworks. • Advanced understanding of IT systems, including system design, object-oriented concepts, databases, and programming fundamentals (HTML, JavaScript/TypeScript, Web Services). • Proficiency in modern test automation tools. • Strong communication and organizational skills to influence strategic initiatives across diverse teams. • Ability to manage multiple work streams and deliver results in a fast-paced environment. • Demonstrated track record architecting and deploying AI/ML or generative AI systems in a production software quality or testing environment (e.g., autonomous test generation, self-healing frameworks, anomaly/risk detection at scale). • Deep fluency with LLM architectures, agentic frameworks, and APIs (e.g., Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, GitHub Copilot), including advanced prompt engineering and evaluation methodology.

Preferred Qualifications • Experience with NodeJS and WebDriverIO/Playwright. • NodeJS / C# / TypeScript. • API/Integration test automation. • Proficiency in API and integration test automation frameworks. • C# .NET Core, and Azure or similar cloud technologies. • REST API testing experience. • Experience with API design and development. • Knowledge and passion toward the App tier/Service layer methodologies. • Experience designing and scaling AI agents/copilots (e.g., MCP-based or similar agentic architectures) embedded directly into CI/CD and enterprise QE pipelines. • Applied experience with RAG pipelines, vector databases, and Python-based ML tooling in a testing or quality-analytics context. • Track record using AI/ML to drive measurable outcomes in defect prediction, test prioritization, or coverage optimization at an organizational scale.

Work Location and Arrangement : Work location is flexible if approved by the Company   Work Authorization:   Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis. Sponsorship will  not  be considered for this specific role. 

About CarMax  

CarMax disrupted the auto industry by delivering the honest, transparent and high-integrity experience customers want and deserve. This innovative thinking around the way cars are bought and sold has helped us become the nation’s larges

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