Cory Trast
// QUALITY ENGINEERING MANAGER · QE & SDET TEAM LEADERSHIP · GEN AI INFERENCE VALIDATIONS

Quality engineering leader with 12+ years driving QA strategy, team leadership, and test automation maturity across enterprise digital and financial platforms, including 12+ years managing QE and SDET teams in fast-paced Agile organizations. Proven track record building test automation frameworks, coaching and mentoring engineers on testing and automation ownership. Partnering with Engineering and Product leadership to align agile quality activities with risk tolerance and ensure on time delivery. Deep experience in enterprise financial services (Prudential Financial), GenAI inference quality validation with chatbot and backend RAG models. Advancing responsible AI-assisted testing practices, ensuring guardrails and non-deterministic values are correct. AWS-certified, with a track record of building high-performing QA organizations from the ground up and communicating quality status through metrics, coverage mapping, and outcome-driven reporting.

Associate
AWS Certified Developer — Associate
● Active
Associate
AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate
● Active
Foundational
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
● Active
Training
Six Sigma Black Belt Training
American Society for Quality  |  2008
GenAI & AI/MLGenAI & Model Validation · Responsible AI-Assisted Testing · Chatbot & Inference Quality Validation
QE LeadershipQE & SDET Team Leadership, Coaching & Mentorship Driving Consistency Across Agile Teams · Cross-Functional Alignment with Product & Engineering Leadership · Quality Governance, Compliance & Workflow Management
Test StrategyRisk-Based Exploratory Testing, Charter Creation & Story-Driven Test Design · Automation Maturity: Low-Code / No-Code, Shift-Left Architecture · Quality Metrics, Coverage Mapping & Outcome-Driven Reporting
Test FrameworksSelenium · TestNG · Cucumber · Appium · Rest Assured
CI/CD & ReleaseJenkins · Bitbucket · Git · Docker
MethodologiesAgile / Scrum · Kanban · Distributed Team Delivery
Cloud / AWSAWS Certified Developer · AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner · AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
PlatformsEnterprise Financial Services & SaaS Platforms
Quality Engineering Practice Lead / Test Engineer, Chief Data Office
Nov 2021 – Present
Prudential Financial
  • Led automation and quality engineering strategy for AI/ML platforms, defining risk-based testing standards across the full service stack.
  • Architected, wrote, and maintained an enterprise no-code automation framework (AWS SDK, Python, API, JMeter), integrated with Jira, Jenkins, Bitbucket, and Maven for CI/CD gating.
  • Extended and curated API automation suites, ensuring scalable coverage and reliable pipeline execution.
  • Drove responsible AI-assisted testing by designing methods to validate chatbot and backend model inference quality.
  • Established governance and compliance standards for auditable AI/ML model evaluation.
  • Coached and led a 10-person QE team on automation design, exploratory testing, and AWS best practices to mature quality engineering capabilities.
  • Partnered with Engineering and Product leadership to document test approaches, tooling, and acceptance criteria.
  • Owned talent acquisition, onboarding, and performance reviews for the QE practice.
AWS SDKPythonJMeterAI/ML ValidationTeam Leadership
Manager, Full Stack Developer – Salesforce Dev-QE (Agile Dream Team)
Jan 2021 – Dec 2021
Prudential Financial
  • Served as an Agile development team member, aligning quality activities with delivery goals while leveraging Salesforce Omni Studio (Velocity) to streamline development and testing processes.
  • Built and maintained Drools rules for API validation, ensuring data integrity and compliance across services.
  • Developed and tested APIs using TypeScript, Java, JavaScript, and MongoDB, implementing unit and integration testing to guarantee code quality and reliability.
  • Built a Salesforce automation harness with dynamic object recognition to bypass unstable dynamic IDs, enabling low/no-code test extension for multiple teams.
Salesforce OmniStudioTypeScriptMongoDBDrools
Manager, Full Stack Developer – Sr. Specialist, Systems Dev
Jan 2019 – Jan 2021
Prudential Financial
  • Defined and implemented a risk-based QA strategy and testing standards adopted across multiple Agile Release Trains.
  • Architected a high-performance API automation framework (Java, Selenium, TestNG, Maven, Cucumber, Rest Assured) integrated with Jira Xray for coverage mapping, and established CI/CD gating with Jenkins and Artifactory for automation governance.
  • Coached and mentored multiple teams in adopting UI and API test automation and risk-based exploratory testing practices, identifying test coverage gaps and recommending tools and frameworks.
  • Partnered with Infrastructure and DevOps teams on workflow and environment support, scaling the infrastructure underpinning continuous testing practices.
JavaSeleniumCucumberJenkinsJira Xray
Lead Quality Engineer
2017 – 2018
Revel Health, Minneapolis, MN
  • Developed and implemented a risk-based quality plan, process, and best practices, establishing the foundation for QA across the organization.
  • Architected a UI and API automation framework using Gherkin/Cucumber, Java, Selenium, Appium, TestNG, and Sauce Labs for scalable testing across browsers and mobile devices.
  • Built Bitbucket CI/CD pipelines for continuous test execution and owned test strategy, planning, and estimation across the SDLC.
  • Built and led a high-performing QE team, driving talent acquisition, coaching, and quality metrics-based decision-making, communicating status through outcome-driven reporting.
SeleniumAppiumSauce LabsBitbucket Pipelines
Lead Engineer
2015 – 2017
Target Corporation, Minneapolis, MN
  • Acted as product owner for a Value Stream Validation framework, standing up applications and ecosystems for cross-application testing and driving delivery through Agile methodologies.
  • Built API validation and reference-environment frameworks (Java, Spring, Rest Assured, Gradle, Docker, Kafka, Postgres) and configured Jenkins for automated test execution and artifact delivery.
  • Designed and led a Selenium/Java UI automation framework for the Item Team, mentoring engineers and integrating Maven, TestNG, and JIRA-based Agile sprints.
JavaKafkaDockerJenkins
Software Quality Assurance Specialist, Senior
2015
SWAT Solutions, Minneapolis, MN
  • Documented framework models and produced Selenium and test automation training content, including lunch-and-learn sessions transitioning teams from QTP to Selenium.
SeleniumQTPTraining
Software Developer Engineer in Test
2014 – 2015
C2its, Minneapolis, MN
  • Designed and coded API and UI test automation frameworks (Visual Studio, Selenium, Appium) enabling cross-platform execution on desktop and Android for client Patterson Dental.
Visual StudioSeleniumAppium
Software Developer Engineer in Test
2012 – 2014
Life Time Fitness, Chanhassen, MN
  • Built a C#/.NET test automation framework with a GUI front end and a run engine wrapping WatiN and Selenium APIs, supporting three product teams.
  • Served as Agile product owner for the framework, managing the backlog and sprint planning while maintaining lab resources (VMs, phones, tablets).
C#.NETWatiNSelenium
Baker College OnlineMS, Information Systems, 3.75 GPA (2025)
Baker College OnlineB.S., Computer Science, 3.75 GPA (2018)
General AssemblySoftware Engineering Immersive — 480 hours
Enterprise Financial Services AI/ML & GenAI Retail Digital Health SaaS Platforms