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Propel Software is seeking a Senior SDET to lead quality engineering and test automation strategy. This is a hands-on technical role focused on building durable, scalable quality systems while maintaining deep product knowledge.
Key Responsibilities:
- Lead with quality judgment: challenge requirements and assumptions; distinguish verification from validation; identify failure modes, edge cases, and business risks.
- Test from the customer's perspective: map real user workflows, anticipate misuse and operational edge cases, and partner early with Product and Engineering to prevent defects.
- Design risk-based test strategy: select the appropriate mix of unit, API, contract, integration, UI, end-to-end, exploratory, regression, and non-functional testing based on product risk and confidence needs.
- Build durable quality engineering systems: create reusable tooling, libraries, test-data capabilities, environment utilities, CI integrations, and observability patterns that improve quality across teams.
- Perform hands-on product investigation: conduct functional and exploratory testing of complex workflows, integrations, and edge cases; translate discoveries into clear defects and durable automated coverage.
- Lead quality-risk decisions: identify, analyze, and prioritize product risks; communicate residual risk and help the team define acceptable quality thresholds for each release.
Required Qualifications:
- 7–10 years of progressive experience in software engineering, SDET, quality engineering, developer productivity, or test-platform engineering, including 5+ years building and evolving automation or test infrastructure.
- Proven ownership of an automation framework, test platform, internal developer tool, CI quality gate, or engineering system from architecture through adoption, operational support, and iterative improvement.
- Experience testing modern systems beyond single web UIs: APIs, asynchronous workflows, distributed services, event-driven systems, data flows, third-party integrations, authentication/authorization, and failure recovery.
- Strong hands-on experience with Playwright and TypeScript preferred; ability to explain trade-offs among UI, API, contract, component, integration, end-to-end, performance, resilience, and exploratory testing.
- Experience making automated testing trustworthy at scale: parallelization, isolation, deterministic test data, environment provisioning, observability, flaky-test diagnosis, retry policy design, quarantine/remediation workflows, and actionable reporting.
- Strong CI/CD experience, including test selection or test-tiering strategies, PR quality gates, artifact collection, failure triage, and reducing feedback time without weakening coverage.
- Ability to design and validate APIs and service boundaries using schema validation, consumer/provider contract testing, mocks/stubs/fakes, service virtualization, and backward-compatibility testing.
- Clearly articulates and applies the difference between verification and validation with concrete examples.
- Proven ability to analyze requirements and designs to uncover gaps, ambiguous behavior, and high-risk areas before implementation.
- Demonstrated skill in designing tests around real user journeys, business workflows, and failure scenarios.
- Experience using risk-based testing to prioritize test areas, depth, and techniques under resource constraints.
- Habitually challenges assumptions from developers, PMs, and stakeholders in a collaborative way that improves the product.
- Ensures test failures produce useful evidence: logs, network traces, screenshots/video, and clear failure classification.
Nice to Have:
- Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or equivalent) to accelerate coding, refactoring, test design, failure analysis, documentation, and exploratory investigation.
- Demonstrated ability to evaluate AI-generated test code for correctness, determinism, maintainability, meaningful assertions, security/privacy implications, and false confidence.
