Title: Senior Engineer, QA Automation
Department: Technology
Job Location: Washington, DC 
Reports To: Lead Software Engineer
Supervisory Role: No
FLSA Status: Exempt

Position Summary

The Senior QA Automation Engineer designs, develops, and maintains automated test scripts to validate software functionality, reducing manual testing efforts and ensuring high-quality releases. In this role, you will lead automation strategy for our suite of web applications and one mobile application, build scalable and maintainable test frameworks, and partner closely with Engineering, Product, QA, and DevOps teams to improve quality throughout the software delivery lifecycle. This role is expected to integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines, expand regression coverage, and help the organization ship high-confidence releases faster. The ideal candidate combines strong hands-on automation experience with sound software engineering practices, strong troubleshooting skills, and the ability to adapt quickly to evolving priorities while collaborating across teams.

Essential Functions

• Design, develop, and maintain automated test scripts and frameworks for web and mobile applications using tools such as Selenium, Cypress, and Playwright
• Create reusable, maintainable, and scalable test automation patterns, utilities, and supporting libraries that improve team efficiency and long-term test stability.
• Evaluate and apply modern AI-assisted coding and test generation tools where appropriate to accelerate development while maintaining accuracy, security, and maintainability
• Integrate automated test execution into CI/CD pipelines to support pull request validation, continuous integration, regression testing, and release readiness workflows
• Develop and execute functional, smoke, regression, end-to-end, and integration test suites across multiple browsers, platforms, and devices
• Partner with software engineers, product managers, QA and DevOps teams to define acceptance criteria, risk based test strategies, and quality gates early in the development lifecycle
• Develop and manage test data, mocks, stubs, fixtures, and environment setup needed for reliable automated and integration testing
• Monitor automation results, improve reporting and visibility into quality trends, and continuously reduce flaky tests and unstable pipelines
• Contribute to API and service-layer testing to complement UI automation and improve speed and depth of feedback
• Support mobile automation strategy, device/browser coverage decisions, and ongoing framework/tooling improvements
• Promote quality engineering best practices, code reviews for test automation, and shared ownership of release quality across the engineering organization

Required Knowledge, Skills, Abilities (KSAs)

• Demonstrated experience building and maintaining automation frameworks for enterprise-grade software applications
• Strong hands-on experience with Selenium, Cypress, and Playwright; experience with web and mobile test automation is required
• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD platforms such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or equivalent tooling
• Solid