Sr SDET

The Mission: Why We Exist, What We Do, And Where You Fit

Our client helps cities and counties modernize their plan review processes. Our software platform replaces manual, paper-heavy workflows with a faster, more transparent system for reviewing and approving building plans, empowering agencies to reduce permit turnaround times and improve service to their communities.

We are at a critical moment: With a fresh investment from a private equity partner, we know our product delivers, our customers love us, and we're sitting at ~$5M ARR. Now, it's time to scale-and that means transforming how we ensure quality. We're evolving into an AI-first plan review platform, and we need testing infrastructure that can keep pace with rapid innovation while maintaining the reliability our government customers depend on.

We're hiring a Sr SDE in Test to own the quality automation strategy and execution across our platform. You will be a player-coach: spending 70% of your time building and maintaining automated test frameworks and test suites, and 30% defining testing strategy, mentoring other SDETs, and pioneering AI-powered testing approaches. You'll establish what "quality excellence" means for a fast-scaling GovTech SaaS company, build robust automation that gives the team confidence to ship quickly, and lay the foundation for a world-class quality engineering function.

This is a hands-on, high-impact role where testing expertise meets AI innovation and DevOps culture. You'll work in a fully remote, agile environment with a modern stack (Angular, TypeScript, Node.js, REST/GraphQL, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Kubernetes on AWS) where everyone is hands-on in AWS. You'll need to balance comprehensive test coverage with speed, bring automation discipline to a growing team, and help us leverage AI to revolutionize how we build and execute tests. Perfect for an experienced quality engineer who thrives on building robust systems, loves exploring cutting-edge testing tools and AI capabilities, and gets energized by shipping reliable software faster.

Outcomes: What Success Looks Like

Objective #1: Assess, stabilize, and establish foundations (First 30 days)

• Conduct comprehensive assessment of existing test automation: review current frameworks, test coverage, execution patterns, flakiness issues, and gaps in the testing pyramid (unit, integration, E2E)
• Interview developers, product managers, and engineering leadership to understand pain points with current quality processes, release confidence levels, and where bugs are slipping through
• Set up your development environment and gain hands-on familiarity with the platform architecture, key user workflows, and critical integration points that require test coverage
• Review the last 3-6 months of production incidents and support tickets to identify patterns in what types of defects are escaping to production and where testing could have caught them
• Establish a quick win by creating an automated test suite to test the top priority scenarios. Present initial assessment to leadership: current state of test automation, biggest quality risks, your recommended approach for balancing immediate stabilization with long-term strategy, and proposed priorities for the first 90 days

Objective #2: Build the testing foundation and achieve velocity (By Month 3)

• Design and implement a comprehensive Playwright-based E2E testing framework with clear patterns for test organization, page object models, test data management, and environment configuration
• Establish testing standards and best practices: how tests should be written, naming conventions, assertion patterns, and guidelines for when to write unit vs integration vs E2E tests
• Build a core library of automated tests covering critical user journeys (plan submission, review workflows, approval processes) and key integration points, achieving measurable improvement in test coverage metrics
• Integrate automated tests into the CI/CD pipeline with clear quality gates, ensuring tests run on every PR and preventing regressions from reaching production
• Create test automation documentation including framework architecture, how to write and run tests, troubleshooting common issues, and contribution guidelines for developers
• Work embedded with development teams in sprints, collaborating on acceptance criteria definition, test planning during story kickoff, and ensuring committed stories meet "done" criteria before sprint close
• Establish metrics and dashboards for test automation health: coverage percentages, test execution time, flakiness rates, and defect escape rates

Objective #3: Scale quality practices and pioneer AI-powered testing (By Month 6)

• Build a scalable test automation strategy that includes clear ownership models, test maintenance processes, and guidelines for expanding coverage as the product grows
• Research, prototype, and implement AI-powered testing tools and approaches: AI-assisted test generation, intelligent test selection, visual regression testing with AI, or self-healing test automation
• Develop a mentorship and knowledge-sharing program for other SDETs and developers, including regular test automation reviews, pairing sessions, and "testing guild" meetings to elevate the team's testing capabilities
• Create a quality engineering playbook documenting testing philosophy, framework decisions, lessons learned, and proven patterns for maintaining high-quality software in a fast-moving environment
• Design and implement performance and load testing frameworks to ensure the platform can scale with customer growth, establishing baselines and regression detection
• Build partnerships with product management to shift quality left: defining testability requirements, reviewing designs for test complexity, and ensuring acceptance criteria are clear and testable
• Establish a test automation roadmap aligned with product evolution: identifying what new capabilities or architectural changes will require testing strategy updates, and planning proactive improvements to the testing infrastructure
• Document resource requirements and operational model for scaling the quality engineering function as the engineering team grows

Competencies: What You Need To Be Uniquely Great At

Must-Haves

• Proven track record building test automation from the ground up: You've taken a product with minimal or ad-hoc testing and built a comprehensive, maintainable automation framework that enabled faster, more confident releases. You've made architectural decisions about testing tools and frameworks and lived with the consequences, learning what works at scale
• Deep expertise in modern test automation frameworks: You're an expert with Playwright and understand the nuances of building reliable E2E tests: handling async operations, managing test data, dealing with flakiness, and optimizing execution speed. You bring established patterns from prior experience that you can adapt to our context
• Player-coach mentality with startup velocity: You're equally comfortable writing 20 automated tests in a sprint as you are designing the testing strategy or mentoring junior SDETs. You know when to write code vs when to document patterns, and you thrive in environments where you need to build the plane while flying it
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: You write clean, maintainable test code with the same rigor as production code. You understand TypeScript/JavaScript deeply, can work effectively in Node.js environments, and bring software design principles to test automation architecture
• DevOps and CI/CD expertise: You've integrated test automation into modern CI/CD pipelines, optimized test execution for speed and reliability, and understand infrastructure-as-code. You're comfortable working hands-on in AWS and can troubleshoot test failures that involve infrastructure issues
• Agile/Scrum excellence: You've worked embedded with agile teams, understand how quality fits into two-week sprints, and can balance the tension between shipping quickly and maintaining comprehensive test coverage. You're skilled at helping teams define clear, testable acceptance criteria
• Bias toward action and pragmatism: You don't wait for perfect test coverage. You identify the highest-risk areas, build automation where it matters most, and iterate based on real-world defect patterns. You're comfortable with ambiguity and make smart tradeoffs between speed and thoroughness

Nice-to-Haves

• AI-powered testing tools experience: You've experimented with or implemented AI-first QA automation tools, whether for test generation, intelligent test selection, self-healing tests, or AI-assisted bug detection
• Production SaaS operations experience: You've supported production systems, understand observability and monitoring, and know how to use production telemetry to inform testing strategy and identify quality gaps
• Performance and load testing expertise: You've designed and executed performance testing strategies, used tools like k6, JMeter, or Artillery, and can identify performance bottlenecks and scalability issues
• Experience with GovTech or highly regulated environments: You understand the quality and compliance requirements for software serving government customers, where bugs can have significant public impact
• Test data management and privacy expertise: You've solved complex test data challenges, understand PII handling in test environments, and can create realistic test data strategies without compromising security
• Visual regression and accessibility testing: You've implemented automated visual testing tools and understand WCAG compliance requirements, ensuring UI changes don't introduce regressions or accessibility issues
• Technical leadership and team building: You've hired, mentored, or led quality engineering teams, and understand how to build a quality culture in engineering organizations

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