Machine learning engineer Jobs in Kaiserslautern

Job Description

About the role

As a Senior Agentic Quality Engineer, you do high-quality test engineering on a platform team, working agentically with Claude Code as your primary collaborator — and you help teammates get better at it.

This is a senior IC position. You design and own automated test suites across your team's interfaces, and you lead TOPdesk's move up the testing-maturity curve. You are a specialist and enabler — building quality capabilities and test infrastructure, tackling the hard cross-interface and non-functional risks, and helping engineers own quality. Product engineers and their teams remain accountable for the quality of what they build; you are not a downstream testing gate.

We think of quality maturity as a progression: manual testing → hand-writing test automation → writing that automation with AI → bounded agents that observe code changes, generate and repair tests, and help keep suites green. More autonomy is not inherently better — the right level depends on the risk. Agent-generated tests and repairs stay traceable to intended behaviour, suspicious changes are escalated, changes to expected behaviour need human approval, and controls prevent agents from weakening assertions just to make a test pass. Most of the industry sits low on that curve; your job is to move us up it responsibly — and bring your teammates with you.

What this is not A manual-QA or test-script-maintenance role, a downstream testing gate, or a role that stops at AI-assisted test writing. You build the agentic quality systems — bounded agents that observe, generate, and repair under human accountability — and you help the team own quality, rather than owning it for them.

The team

You join a platform or product team, reporting to an Engineering Manager. The team owns a coherent area of the product and exposes interfaces other teams depend on — so correctness, contract stability, and clear failure isolation are central to everything you test.

What you'll do

The work spans three distinct problems, and you keep them clear: testing agentic product behaviour, using agents to test conventional software, and building the agentic quality infrastructure that supports both.

Quality engineering

• Design and maintain automated test suites across your team's interfaces and surfaces.

• Write integration and contract tests that validate the interfaces your team provides to others — focused on correctness, schema stability, and clear failure isolation.

• Bring advanced quality practices where they earn their place: property-based testing, fuzzing, mutation testing, contract testing, non-functional testing, and production-quality signals.

• Assess non-functional risks: performance regressions, data consistency, access control, sensitive-data handling, migration safety, backward compatibility.

• Investigate failing builds: triage root cause, distinguish product bugs from test brittleness, clarify ownership across team boundaries.

Work with Claude, stay accountable

• Use Claude Code as your primary collaborator for generating tests, investigating failures, proposing fixes, and drafting multi-file change sets.

• Write briefs, acceptance criteria, and CLAUDE.md conventions that Claude can execute against without further clarification; use subagents and MCP tools to go beyond single-shot prompting.

• Build evals and headless agent runs in CI that catch regressions automatically — not just tests a human triggers.

• Review and approve Claude-generated test suites before they merge — verify correctness, coverage, traceability to intended behaviour, and that assertions were not weakened just to pass; escalate suspicious changes and require human approval for any change to expected behaviour.

• Build reusable prompting patterns and context conventions for test generation in the codebase.

Contribute to the quality journey

• Share what works in agentic quality engineering through demos, retros, documentation, and conversation.

• Contribute to shared quality standards: validation artefacts on AI-assisted PRs, CI quality gates, coverage expectations.

• Surface where agentic approaches could reduce test toil or improve coverage.

• Help engineers own quality and move the team up the testing-maturity curve — beyond manual and AI-assisted test writing toward bounded agents that observe changes, write and repair tests, and help keep suites green — matching autonomy to risk and never lowering the quality bar.

Technical environment

Claude Code is our current primary agentic engineering environment: agents may plan and execute within defined constraints and governed environments, while engineers stay accountable for problem framing, architecture, acceptance criteria, security, verification, and production outcomes. Agent-generated work is backed by automated tests, runtime checks, reviewable evidence, and risk-based human approval — we match deterministic automation, structured workflows, or agents to the nature and risk of the task rather than maximising autonomy for its own sake.

• Stack: Python, TypeScript, Vue, Postgres, Azure, Kubernetes; cloud-native / service-oriented architecture; Terraform-managed infrastructure — the exact mix depends on your team.

• Mechanisms: subagents, MCP tool integrations, multi-agent workflows, and shared prompt, agent, and eval libraries.

Success in your first year

• Healthy automated suites across your team's interfaces, kept healthy as it evolves.

• Contract and integration coverage that catches breakages before consuming teams do.

• Reusable agentic test-generation patterns and evals adopted in the codebase and CI.

• Teammates are measurably better at agentic quality engineering because of how you work.

Qualifications

Required

• 5+ years in test or quality engineering with ownership of automated test suites across a team or service.

• Strong API and integration testing skills — the team's output is almost entirely interfaces.

• Hands-on Claude Code experience — test generation, failure analysis, multi-file editing; not just autocomplete.

• CI/CD fluency — writing and maintaining quality gates, not just running them.

• Writes acceptance criteria that leave no ambiguity for implementation or for Claude to execute against.

• Comfort with data-adjacent testing: databases, data integrity, consistency, and API contracts.

• Fluent English for clear communication with engineers, product stakeholders, and other teams.

Nice to have

• Contract testing or consumer-driven contract patterns.

• SQL for test-data setup and assertion.

• Security-aware testing: secrets management, sensitive-data handling, compliance contexts.

• Search-engine testing: relevance, edge cases, performance.

• Experience contributing to a team's AI tooling adoption.

Additional Information

What's in it for you

• A strong focus on personal development — including, in the Netherlands, our “10 to Grow” programme: 10% of your time and budget for your own growth.

• A hybrid working environment built on freedom, trust, and responsibility.

• An open, informal, and supportive culture, with collaboration across national borders.

• Excellent employment conditions.

Want to apply?

Does this sound like your next step? Apply with your CV and a short motivation letter via the application form. Tell us, with an example, how you gave both people and technical direction to a team — and what it shipped as a result.