Principal Engineer - Verification, Validation & Test Automation

Job Description Summary

Become part of a winning team and help to deliver the Green Energy transition.

The Principal Engineer for Verification, Validation (V&V) and Test Automation is a global technical authority for the Conventional Protection and Control (CPAC) product lines within GE Vernova's Grid Automation Business.

This role is responsible for defining V&V strategy, establishing enterprise standards, and ensuring that products meet functional, reliability, and performance expectations throughout development and deployment.

A core mandate of this role is to assure product-level performance and reduce defect escape by strengthening verification rigor, expanding test automation, and improving early detection of performance, scalability, and robustness issues across globally distributed teams.

Job Description

Responsibilities:

Technical Leadership & Governance:

• Define, maintain, and enforce V&V strategy, technical standards/rules, and best practices. Ensure V&V strategies are aligned with product requirements, operating profiles, and customer use cases.
• Act as Design Authority for V&V, test automation, and performance verification approaches.
• Chair and lead verification and performance-focused design reviews.
• Review and approve test architectures, performance test plans, and readiness for major milestones.
• Provide formal technical sign-off for V&V and performance readiness.

• Lead architecture and evolution of automated test frameworks supporting functional and performance validation and verification.
• Define scalable test infrastructure capable of validating real-world product workloads.

• Unit and component testing and system-level test environments
• Automated performance, stress, and endurance testing.

• Analyse verification gaps, defect escape data, and field feedback to identify systemic issues.
• Improve early detection of performance and integration defects.
• Define and track metrics for verification effectiveness, including performance-related escapes.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives to reduce late-stage and field-discovered issues.

• Lead or support investigation of performance-related and system-level issues discovered during development or in deployed products.
• Guide reproduction, instrumentation, and test gap analysis.
• Ensure verification enhancements prevent recurrence.

• Bachelor's Degree in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics) from an accredited college or university.
• Significant and demonstrated years of experience in verification, validation, and test automation for embedded or industrial systems.
• Proven experience verifying product-level performance in real-time systems.
• Expertise designing automated test frameworks, including performance and stress testing.
• Demonstrated success reducing performance-related defect escapes.
• Experience acting as a technical authority in a global organisation.
• Excellent communication and technical leadership skills in a global, matrixed organisation.

• Experience with lab automation, and instrumentation.
• Knowledge of fault injection, endurance testing, and long-duration stability testing.
• Experience with functional safety and industrial standards, knowledge on IEC 61850, IEEE 1588 and/or SCADA, networking protocols (IEC 62439-3).
• Background in industrial automation, energy, or mission-critical applications.
• Experience integrating performance testing into SAFe Agile process.

• Product performance validated against real-world use cases before release.
• Early detection of performance regressions and scalability limits.
• Reduced late-stage and field performance issues.
• Scalable, automated verification infrastructure reused across product lines.
• Advanced alignment between product requirements, design, and verification.

• Senior individual contributor with enterprise-wide technical influence.
• Acts as Design Authority and quality champion, not a line manager.
• Balances deep technical expertise with governance and continuous improvement leadership.
• Operates across multiple products and global development sites.