SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Smallest.ai is building next-generation AI infrastructure and voice technology to power intelligent products at scale, working across speech, LLMs, and real-time AI systems.
You will join as a Senior QA Automation & Performance Engineer in an individual-contributor role, owning quality engineering across backend systems. This is a hands-on position requiring strong technical ownership and close collaboration with engineering, product, and infrastructure teams.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design and build scalable automation frameworks for functional, integration, end-to-end, and performance testing of backend services and APIs
- Automate testing across multi-service, multi-tenant platforms, validating tenant isolation, authentication, permissions, and data integrity
- Design and execute load, stress, spike, scalability, and endurance tests
- Define performance benchmarks and acceptance criteria for latency, throughput, concurrency, reliability, and error rates
- Identify performance bottlenecks and collaborate with backend and infrastructure engineers to resolve them
- Test business logic, data flows, asynchronous processes, integrations, and complete customer workflows
- Build reusable test utilities, fixtures, test-data strategies, and environment-management capabilities
- Integrate functional and performance test suites into CI/CD pipelines
- Analyze failures using logs, metrics, and traces to distinguish product defects from environment or framework issues
- Identify edge cases, regressions, failure scenarios, and production risks before release
- Improve test coverage, quality gates, and QA processes across the engineering organization
Requirements:
- 4+ years of experience in software quality engineering, test automation, or SDET roles
- Strong hands-on experience with both functional and performance testing
- Demonstrated experience building or significantly extending an automation framework from the ground up
- Experience testing backend APIs, distributed services, and end-to-end workflows
- Experience with multi-service architectures; exposure to multi-tenant SaaS systems strongly preferred
- Hands-on experience with performance-testing tools such as k6, JMeter, Gatling, or Locust
- Ability to design realistic workload models and analyze latency percentiles, throughput, concurrency, saturation, and failure rates
- Strong programming or scripting skills in Python, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, or Go
- Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD systems
- Working knowledge of databases, queues, caching, APIs, and asynchronous workflows
- Familiarity with logs, monitoring, and observability tools for troubleshooting
- Strong understanding of testing fundamentals, SDLC, STLC, and defect-management practices
- Ability to operate as an independent contributor while working closely with multiple engineering teams
- Strong analytical thinking, attention to detail, and clear written and verbal communication
Desirable:
- Experience in high-growth or product-led technology startups
- Experience testing real-time, AI, voice, streaming, or latency-sensitive systems
- Familiarity with Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud infrastructure
- Experience testing WebSockets, streaming APIs, or event-driven architectures
- Experience with security, resilience, failover, or chaos testing
- Experience validating SLA/SLO requirements and production performance metrics
