Senior QA Automation Engineer (SDET)

About the Role

Our client is a long-established US B2B SaaS company whose platform runs the daily operations of schools: enrollment, student records, communication, billing, and compliance reporting. The product has been in continuous development for over two decades and serves hundreds of institutions that depend on it daily.

They are hiring their first-ever automation engineer. There is no test suite today and limited formalized test cases. This role builds the automated QA function from the ground up.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Design and build the company's first automated test suite in Playwright, starting with browser-level coverage of the core application
• Write the test cases as well as automate them. Much of the product's expected behavior isn't documented, so you'll establish it from the application, the source code, and colleagues who know the product and the education sector
• Establish the patterns, conventions, and tooling the suite will live by, with input from engineering and QA
• Add stable element descriptors to templates as you go, in small reviewed changes alongside the tests that need them, so the suite binds to something durable rather than to markup that shifts
• Own the existing test environment, a replica database seeded with development data, and make it usable by non-technical QA colleagues
• Use AI as a working tool throughout: drafting specs, generating candidate tests from documentation and code, and investigating failures faster than by hand
• Work alongside a small engineering team to catch regressions before they reach customers

What We're Looking for:

• Senior-level test automation experience, with a suite you built or substantially owned
• Deep hands-on experience with Playwright
• Comfort automating server-rendered applications, including iframes, pop-ups, and full page reloads. This is not a single-page app
• Experience testing a product whose expected behavior isn't written down, and the ability to establish it from the application, the code, and the team
• Comfortable working directly in HTML templates and committing small, reviewed changes to a codebase you didn't write
• Genuine working fluency with AI tools, and judgment about where their output can and cannot be trusted
• Solid SQL, and the ability to build and manage test data directly in a relational database
• Able to work independently in an existing test environment: deploy a branch to it, load and refresh test data, and tell whether a failure is the application or the environment, rather than waiting on a developer
• The instinct to keep digging when you reach the edge of what you know
• Excellent spoken and written English, clear on calls with a US team
• Solid US Central time overlap