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Chartbeat Inc. is seeking a Senior QA Automation Engineer to establish and lead QA automation capabilities for a large, mature application with over 20 years of development history. This is a hands-on engineering role combining automation framework design with practical test development and technical leadership.
Key Responsibilities:
Framework Architecture & Standards: Design, build, and evolve the foundational QA automation framework using TypeScript and Playwright. Establish scalable patterns for test organization, reusable components, fixtures, configuration, environment management, reporting, and execution. Evaluate technical approaches and make pragmatic recommendations based on maintainability, reliability, performance, and long-term scalability. Identify and address architectural issues before they become sources of significant maintenance burden.
Automated Test Development: Design, implement, maintain, and troubleshoot automated tests covering critical application workflows. Develop automation across multiple testing layers including end-to-end browser testing, API testing, integration testing, and database validation. Create reusable automation components and abstractions to simplify test development and maintenance. Analyze test failures to distinguish application defects from automation, test-data, environment, and infrastructure issues. Balance test coverage with execution time, reliability, and maintenance cost.
Automation Strategy & Quality Standards: Help define automation standards and best practices for test structure, code organization, error handling, logging, reporting, retries, test isolation, and failure diagnostics. Identify high-value automation candidates and determine appropriate testing levels. Design automation with reliability and diagnosability in mind. Participate in code reviews to continuously improve codebase quality.
CI/CD & Test Execution: Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines and establish effective quality gates. Design and improve test execution strategies including parallel execution, test selection, environment configuration, and reporting. Partner with DevOps and engineering teams to improve reliability and efficiency. Ensure test results are visible, actionable, and useful to development and QA teams.
Data Validation & Test Data Management: Write and analyze SQL queries to validate application and database state. Understand relational database structures and stored procedures. Develop reliable approaches for creating, manipulating, and cleaning up test data. Establish test-data strategies supporting repeatable and isolated execution.
Engineering Productivity: Identify repetitive QA and engineering workflows suitable for automation. Develop utilities and scripts using Node.js, PowerShell, or other appropriate tools. Automate supporting processes such as test setup, environment configuration, pipeline operations, and administrative workflows.
Technical Leadership & Collaboration: Provide technical guidance to other automation engineers through design discussions, code reviews, pairing, and documentation. Mentor less-experienced engineers and develop the team's overall automation capabilities. Collaborate with developers, QA engineers, DevOps, and other stakeholders. Communicate technical decisions, tradeoffs, risks, and recommendations clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Requirements:
- Significant professional experience in QA automation, software development in test, or comparable automation engineering role
- Demonstrated experience designing, establishing, or significantly evolving an automated testing framework (not solely developing tests within existing frameworks)
- Strong hands-on TypeScript or JavaScript development experience with solid understanding of software engineering principles
- Strong experience with Playwright or comparable modern browser automation framework
- Experience designing and maintaining automated end-to-end and API tests
- Strong understanding of automation architecture, reusable abstractions, test isolation, configuration management, error handling, and debugging
- Working knowledge of SQL and relational databases, including ability to construct queries for data validation and test setup
- Practical experience integrating automated testing into CI/CD pipelines
- Experience diagnosing complex automation failures across application, test, environment, data, and infrastructure layers
- Strong written and verbal communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively across engineering disciplines
- Ability to work independently, take ownership of technical problems, and carry solutions from design through implementation and maintenance
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience introducing automation into mature or legacy applications with significant existing functionality and technical debt
- Experience helping establish a new QA automation team, automation practice, or testing platform
- Deep hands-on experience with Playwright including fixtures, parallel execution, network interception/mocking, configuration, tracing, and debugging
- Experience developing Node.js and/or PowerShell utilities and engineering automation
- Experience working with stored procedures and complex relational database systems
- Experience with test-data management and automated environment setup/teardown
- Experience improving reliability, execution time, or maintainability of large automated regression suites
- Experience mentoring junior or mid-level automation engineers
