Senior Quality Engineer

It's a new day with a new opportunity at 8am! 

About the role:

We are seeking an experienced Senior Quality Engineer to join our Quality Engineering team at 8am. In this role, you will serve as a customer advocate and quality champion for your embedded scrum team, ensuring the functionality, reliability, performance, and user experience of our FinTech/Back-End SaaS platform through comprehensive testing strategies and collaborative engineering practices.

At 8am, Quality is not a phase—it's a mindset woven into every conversation, decision, and line of code. As a senior member of the team, you'll leverage your deep testing expertise to drive quality improvements that impact not just your immediate team but the broader engineering organization. You'll mentor junior engineers, contribute to process improvements, and take ownership of quality initiatives that protect and enhance our customers' experience.

About us:

At 8am, our vision is to power a world where professionals thrive. We start every day on a mission to empower professionals with the most trusted, innovative technology to deliver world-class outcomes for their clients and exceptional financial results for their business. They count on our purpose-built solutions to simplify operations, ensure compliance, and fuel profitable growth, so they can focus on their clients and do more of the work that matters.

Founded in 2005, 8am™ (formerly AffiniPay) is the professional business platform built to help legal, accounting, and other client-focused professionals run stronger, more profitable businesses. Today, more than 250,000 professionals across the U.S. trust 8am to help them work smarter, serve clients better, and unlock their full potential. We have been recognized as one of Inc 5000’s fastest growing companies in the U.S. for 13 years in a row, and as a result, our teams continue to grow as well!

What you'll do:

Customer Advocacy & Technical Excellence

• Champion the customer experience at every stage of development, viewing deliverables through the customer's lens
• Design and execute comprehensive test strategies across UI, API, and database layers, ensuring they reflect real customer scenarios
• Speak up when features aren't complete enough to test or when quality concerns arise—even if it means slowing down
• Challenge requirements that don't serve customer needs and identify issues that could frustrate users before they reach production
• Write high-quality test cases that tell a story about customer interactions and maintain them through their entire lifecycle
• Identify and document defects with comprehensive root cause analysis, always including "how this affects the customer" assessments
• Drive continuous improvement in our Defect Leakage Rate (≤15% target), recognizing that every bug reaching production erodes customer trust

Leadership & Execution

• Complete 90%+ of assigned tasks independently while providing guidance and mentorship to junior engineers
• Own quality initiatives and drive measurable improvements to QE processes and standards
• Create and lead test plan reviews using test management tools like TestRail or Qase, ensuring adherence to documented standards
• Engage with Product Owners and Product Management on feature feasibility, testability, and requirement clarification
• Become a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for specific technical areas or product components
• Track and report on Quality KPIs, with particular focus on Defect Leakage Rate—our primary customer-focused metric that measures bugs caught by QE versus those found by customers
• Collaborate with SDET team/Developers on determining what tests are high value for automation, and ensuring that test automation operates as expected, owning automated test execution.  

Technical Proficiency

• Demonstrate proficient to advanced networking and Linux skills, utilizing command-line tools across common distributions
• Leverage Python scripting for assisting with test automation tasks as necessary (Dedicated SDET team owns framework and most automation tasks).  Willingness to learn basic Python scripting if not previously leveraged
• Validate services deployed on AWS and other cloud platforms, managing test environments and cloud resources efficiently
• Basic understanding of security and performance testing

Collaboration & Communication

• Work effectively within scrum team, and across them when user features span teams, contributing meaningfully to technical discussions
• Translate technical issues into customer experience impacts f