Fred Mottey

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Resume

Engineer · Developer experience, CI/CD, and AI-native engineering workflows

Engineer and developer experience advocate with 10+ years building test frameworks, CI pipelines, and internal tools. At Expel, set quality engineering standards for a data platform processing billions of events per day. Passionate about building tooling that lets engineering teams ship faster and safer.

LinkedIn · GitHub

Experience

Principal SDET, Expel

May 2019 to Oct 2026

Principal SDET: Feb 2025 to Oct 2026
Senior SDET: May 2019 to Feb 2025
Remote

  • Stood up Expel’s first front-end E2E test framework using TestCafe, adopted by 10 engineers across the quality and front-end teams. Wrote Cypress tests in TypeScript and worked on the migration from TestCafe to Playwright.
  • Built Python CLI tools and test infrastructure that let engineers run and verify API workflows end to end, turning an hours-long manual testing process into minutes.
  • Cut CircleCI pipeline cycle times by about 40% by finding and fixing bottlenecks. Used Docker for CI build and test infrastructure and reproducible local test environments.
  • Defined testing strategy for Data Engineering services, setting goals and approaches for each test layer, leading to adoption of Pact contract tests across service boundaries.
  • Authored the engineering code coverage standard adopted by leadership and built coverage tracking across 20 services with weekly reports in Slack.
  • Designed integration coverage for synchronous APIs and asynchronous event-driven workflows across GCP microservices, validating data in PostgreSQL and AWS S3 and tracing failures with Datadog.
  • Tested cybersecurity detection systems with Detection engineering, verifying detection rules and building test event data and tooling.
  • Prototyped a CI failure triage tool that fed Claude CI error output and recent diffs to classify failures. Built Claude Code agent skills that generate tests and flag risks in pull requests.
  • Interviewed and helped hire the entire eight-person quality team. Mentored engineers on test design and test layering.

QA Automation Engineer, RBA, Inc.

Dec 2015 to Apr 2019

Remote

  • Automated web tests with Selenium WebDriver in C# and Protractor, and moved runs to cloud execution to shorten test cycles.
  • Ran load and performance tests with JMeter and BlazeMeter, and API tests with Postman.
  • Wrote and set up test builds in Sauce Labs that ran web tests against desktop and mobile breakpoints.
  • Researched and implemented improvements to the team’s automation framework.

QA Analyst, Assessment Systems

Jan 2015 to Dec 2015

Minneapolis

  • Wrote and executed functional tests for an online assessment platform.
  • Signed off on releases and led front-end test automation with TestComplete.

Skills

  • Languages: Python, TypeScript, JavaScript (Node.js), SQL, C#, Go (working familiarity)
  • Testing: Playwright, Cypress, TestCafe, Pact, Selenium WebDriver, Sauce Labs, Postman, JMeter, BlazeMeter, TestComplete, Protractor
  • Quality practice: Test strategy and layering, coverage standards, technical design review, flaky test management, resilience and load testing
  • CI/CD and infrastructure: CircleCI, Docker, Kubernetes (K3s), Argo CD, Terraform, Git/GitHub, Proxmox
  • Cloud, data, and observability: GCP, AWS S3, Kafka, Pub/Sub, PostgreSQL, Datadog
  • AI tooling: Claude Code, Claude agent skills, Anthropic API, AI-assisted CI failure triage

Projects

Platform engineering home lab: Proxmox host running K3s, with GitOps deployments managed through Argo CD and a separate K3s sandbox node on Ubuntu Server.

Education

B.S. Psychology, emphasis in Psychometrics
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities · 2014