Senior QA Automation Engineer

Role Overview

Buildout is hiring its first dedicated Senior QA Automation Engineer to own end-to-end (E2E) test automation across its products. The role is high-autonomy: you will set the strategy for how E2E testing is done, improve coverage for critical user journeys, and keep the test suite fast, reliable, and meaningful.

Responsibilities

• Own the E2E test suite: design, build, and maintain automated tests in Playwright (TypeScript).
• Backfill and prioritize coverage: audit the current suite, identify highest-risk gaps, and systematically close them.
• Kill flakiness: root-cause flaky tests; establish quarantine/retry policies; manage test data and environment stability; maintain high signal-to-noise so red builds are actionable.
• Shape CI integration: partner with DevOps to decide where tests run in the pipeline, how often they run, parallelization strategy, runtime budgets, and merge/deploy gating.
• Test at the right layer: move checks to API/integration layers when appropriate instead of relying on browser-only coverage; keep the suite fast as it grows.
• Enable the team: coach developers on writing high-quality Playwright tests, review test code, and create utilities/patterns/documentation.
• Report on quality: co-own quality metrics such as critical path coverage, suite reliability, and defect escape rate; communicate trends to leadership.
• Use modern tooling: leverage AI-assisted development (Claude Code) to accelerate test authoring and maintenance.

Requirements

• 5+ years in quality engineering, test automation, or software engineering with a strong automation focus.
• Deep hands-on Playwright expertise with experience building/maintaining substantial E2E suites.
• Strong TypeScript/JavaScript proficiency; test code you would be comfortable shipping.
• CI/CD fluency and experience integrating/operating test suites in pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI), including parallelization and selective execution.
• Proven ability to fix flakiness at scale; can explain diagnostics and remediation clearly.
• Strong ownership and ability to convert ambiguous goals into a prioritized plan.
• Teaching and leadership: mentoring, running code reviews, and raising the team’s testing bar.

Nice to Have

• API-layer automation experience (REST, contract testing).
• Experience defining and reporting quality metrics (defect escape rate, coverage models).
• Familiarity with Ruby on Rails (primary application stack).