Senior SDET - Test Automation & Performance Engineering | Contract | Remote US
The Role:
We are looking for a Senior SDET / Test Automation Engineer for a project based assignment to build the automated testing and release systems that ensure our products remain reliable as traffic, data volume, integrations, partners, and release velocity increase. This is a hands-on engineering role focused on test automation, API and integration testing, performance and scalability testing, and CI/CD quality gates within an AWS-based environment.
This is not a manual QA position. You will design and build reusable test infrastructure, automate critical product and partner workflows, create realistic performance scenarios, and provide engineering teams with clear evidence of whether a release is ready for production.
You will work closely with engineering teams and the Performance & Reliability Engineering Lead to ensure quality and scalability are built into the development lifecycle rather than treated as a final release checkpoint.
Key Responsibilities:
Design and evolve the automated testing architecture across products and engineering teams
Build and maintain automated API, integration, contract, end-to-end, regression, and UI tests where appropriate
Develop reusable test frameworks, fixtures, synthetic data, mocks, and environment strategies
Build automated testing for distributed services and integrations running within AWS environments
Design and execute load, stress, spike, soak, scalability, degradation, and recovery tests
Translate performance and capacity scenarios into repeatable automated test suites with measurable pass/fail thresholds
Model realistic workloads, concurrency levels, traffic patterns, data volumes, and dependency behavior
Integrate automated suites into CI/CD pipelines and establish enforceable quality and release gates
Create automated release checks tied to quality, latency, reliability, and performance thresholds
Establish practices for identifying, quarantining, diagnosing, and eliminating flaky tests
Improve test observability and failure reporting so engineers can quickly understand and diagnose issues
Build and maintain reliable test data and test environment strategies
Debug failures across APIs, services, databases, infrastructure, and external integrations
Partner with Performance & Reliability Engineering to validate scalability assumptions and production readiness
Partner with Security Engineering on permissions, isolation, negative-path, and abuse-related test scenarios
Track testing trends and help reduce escaped defects, flaky tests, manual release effort, and regression risk
Coach engineers on testability, automation, quality ownership, and defect-prevention practices
Required Skills:
Strong experience as an SDET, Software Engineer in Test, Test Automation Engineer, Quality Engineer, or similar engineering-focused testing role
Strong software development and test automation skills
Experience testing APIs, distributed services, integrations, and cloud-based applications
Hands-on experience working within AWS environments
Strong experience building automated API and integration test frameworks
Hands-on performance and scalability testing experience using tools such as k6, Gatling, Locust, JMeter, or equivalent
Experience designing realistic performance workloads rather than simply executing predefined load tests
Experience with load, stress, spike, soak, and scalability testing
Strong experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines
Experience establishing automated quality gates and release criteria
Experience with contract testing and testing across service boundaries
Strong understanding of test-data management, synthetic data, fixtures, mocks, and environment reliability
Experience using logs, metrics, traces, and other observability tools to diagnose test and system failures
Strong debugging skills across applications, APIs, infrastructure, databases, and integrations
Experience identifying and reducing flaky or unreliable automated tests
Ability to influence engineering teams and promote shared ownership of quality without becoming a centralized testing bottleneck
Nice to have:
Experience testing high-scale SaaS or distributed platforms
Experience with AWS services supporting highly available or distributed applications
Experience testing systems with significant traffic, concurrency, or availability requirements
Experience with resilience, failure injection, dependency degradation, or recovery testing
Experience with infrastructure-as-code and ephemeral or automated test environments
Experience with security-adjacent testing, including permissions, authentication, authorization, isolation, and negative-path scenarios
Identity, DNS, registry, or security domain experience
Experience building quality or test platforms used across multiple engineering teams
What Success Looks Like
Within your first several months, you will have:
Established a clear risk-based automation strategy across critical product and partner workflows
Built reliable automated regression, API, integration, and contract test coverage
Created repeatable performance and scalability tests for the platform's highest-risk journeys
Established realistic test-data and environment strategies
Integrated critical test suites directly into CI/CD pipelines
Implemented measurable release gates tied to quality, latency, reliability, and performance thresholds
Reduced flaky tests and improved the clarity and actionability of automated test failures
Established performance trend reporting and repeatable load, soak, and failure-testing capabilities
Reduced manual release validation and increased confidence in production readiness
Helped establish shared quality ownership across engineering teams
Employment type:
Contract
*Applicants must be authorized to work for ANY employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time
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