Staff Software QA Automation Engineer

About AppDirect Become a digital, global citizen and enable the new generation of digital entrepreneurs around the world. AppDirect offers a subscription commerce platform to sell any product, through any channel, on any device - as a service. We power millions of subscriptions worldwide for organizations. We do this by our values-driven culture—one that enables you to Be Seen, Be Yourself, and Do Your Best Work. About the Role We’re looking for a Senior Quality Engineer (QE) who can operate both strategically and tactically — someone who can define what quality means across multiple squads of engineers, build scalable testing strategies, and influence how engineers test, measure, and improve the reliability of our platform. Our engineering organization is structured into multiple squads of two engineers each, each owning distinct parts of our product ecosystem. The QE will partner with all squads to define what should be tested, how it should be tested (manual vs. automated), and why — ensuring consistent standards and meaningful coverage across the platform. You won’t be manually testing or automating every feature yourself — your impact will come from building frameworks, defining strategies, and enabling engineers to execute with quality in mind . You’ll also own key quality KPIs across the organization, such as resiliency, defect rate, recovery time, and reliability — and lead initiatives to improve them. What You’ll Do and How You’ll Make an Impact Partner with each squad to define test strategies for new work items — clarifying what should be automated, what should be manually verified, and where risks lie. Drive quality metrics (e.g., bug volume, MTTR, reliability, performance) by establishing baselines, tracking trends, and leading improvement efforts. Build and maintain automation frameworks and test suites across microservices — API, contract, performance, functional testing and own comprehensive regression testing suites. Influence CI/CD testing practices , ensuring automated validation gates and quality signals exist throughout our delivery pipelines. Collaborate cross‑functionally with engineers, product managers, and architects to integrate quality from design through deployment. Coach and mentor engineers in testing best practices, testability design, and automation principles. Evaluate and introduce new tools or techniques to strengthen our testing ecosystem and improve developer velocity. Champion a culture of quality , helping shift testing left and embedding quality ownership within every squad. Contribute strategically to the broader company quality efforts. What You’ll Need 5+ years of experience in QA, including 3+ in a senior or lead role. Strong foundation in test strategy design and automation frameworks for distributed, microservice-based systems. Proficiency with testing tools such as Cypress , RestAssured , JUnit , or equivalent for API and end‑to‑end testing. Experience with performance testing tools (JMeter, Gatling, K6, etc.). Familiarity with Docker , Kubernetes , and modern DevOps pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, etc.). Working knowledge of SQL and databases such as MySQL or MongoDB. Solid understanding of CI/CD , source control , and observability best practices. Excellent collaboration, communication, and leadership skills — able to influence without direct authority. Experience in Agile environments and with tools like JIRA for issue tracking and incident management. Familiarity with monitoring/logging tools such as Datadog, Grafana, or ELK Stack. Experience defining test strategies for microservice architectures , including resilience, failover, and load testing. At AppDirect, we believe that innovation thrives in an environment that houses diversity of excellence, experience and thought. We respect each AppDirector as their own fingerprint; unique with no one alike. We foster an environment of inclusion without regard to race, religion, age, sexual orientation, or gender identity enabling AppDirectors to embrace their uniqueness to do their best work. As such, we strongly encourage applications from Indigenous peoples, racialized people, people with disabilities, people from gender and sexually diverse communities, and/or people with intersectional identities. At AppDirect we take privacy very seriously. For more information about our use and handling of personal data from job applicants, please read our Candidate Privacy Policy. For more information of our general privacy practices, please see AppDirect Privacy Notice: #J-18808-Ljbffr