Quality Assurance Engineer

First Orion•North Little Rock, AR

About The Position

First Orion is seeking a Quality Assurance Engineer to help ensure the quality, reliability, and customer experience of its customer-facing portal applications. This hands-on role primarily supports portal capabilities while contributing to shared quality and regression coverage and providing backup for the API contract-testing engine. The QA Engineer is an embedded member of the Branded Calling solutions delivery team, partnering with Product and Engineering throughout the software development lifecycle. The role evaluates requirements, defines comprehensive test scenarios, identifies quality risks, performs functional and exploratory testing, and develops and maintains automated tests. It also partners with the QA Automation Engineer to expand reusable automation, improve regression coverage, and support reliable automated test execution. The position includes test planning and strategy, testing across UI, API, backend, and data layers, automated test development using Playwright with TypeScript and a Java/Gradle API contract-testing framework, AI-assisted quality engineering, defect management, release communication, and contributions to team standards and continuous improvement.

Requirements

Professional software QA or quality engineering experience supporting web applications, services, or data-driven systems.
Experience independently leading test planning and quality strategy for complex features or product areas.
Strong experience with functional, integration, regression, exploratory, negative, and risk-based testing.
Hands-on experience developing automated web tests using Playwright and TypeScript.
Experience testing REST APIs, including OpenAPI specifications, JSON, authentication, HTTP behavior, and error handling.
Working knowledge of SQL for data validation and troubleshooting.
Ability to read Java, work within Gradle projects, and run and troubleshoot JUnit test suites.
Working knowledge of Agile development, defect tracking, CI/CD, and the software development lifecycle.
Comfort working from the command line, using Git, and running Python and shell scripts.
Experience using an AI coding agent against a codebase and evaluating its output.
Strong troubleshooting, communication, organization, and independent work-management skills.

Nice To Haves

Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines.
Experience testing configurable, multi-tenant, white-label, regional, or customer-specific applications.
Experience testing authentication, authorization, permissions, and role-based access.
Experience with test traceability, Jira, distributed systems, or API contract testing.
Experience mentoring QA professionals.
Experience with Java, Python, or shell scripting for test tooling.
Familiarity with Allure, Node tooling, AWS CLI/S3/SSO, accessibility testing, visual regression, or performance testing.
Experience creating instructions or guardrails for AI coding agents.

Responsibilities

Develop understanding of customer journeys, integrations, configurations, roles and permissions, business rules, and system dependencies.
Participate in backlog refinement, feature planning, requirements reviews, and technical discussions.
Identify gaps, edge cases, dependencies, data needs, permission considerations, and quality risks before development is complete.
Translate requirements and acceptance criteria into test scenarios covering positive, negative, boundary, role-based, configuration, and integration scenarios.
Assess potential change impacts across portal applications, shared services, APIs, workflows, and customer experience.
Test new features, enhancements, configuration changes, integrations, and defect fixes across UI, API, backend, and data layers.
Perform functional, integration, regression, exploratory, negative, permission, configuration, and risk-based testing.
Use API clients, application logs, browser tools, SQL queries, and other evidence to validate results and troubleshoot failures.
Validate accessibility, cross-browser behavior, responsive layouts, defects, and fixes.
Conduct targeted regression testing based on the functional and technical impact of changes.
Develop, maintain, execute, and troubleshoot automated tests using Playwright with TypeScript and the Java/Gradle API contract-testing framework.
Build automated coverage for acceptance criteria, business rules, customer journeys, and regression scenarios as part of feature delivery.
Review automated results and distinguish application defects from environment, configuration, data, and automation issues.
Partner with the QA Automation Engineer on reusable components, test data, CI/CD execution, reporting, and flaky-test reduction.
Participate in peer reviews and help maintain reliable, maintainable test code.
Use AI coding agents, including Kiro, to support work within test codebases; maintain appropriate instructions, skills, and guardrails; and validate AI-generated output against requirements and observed system behavior.
Document defects with clear reproduction steps, evidence, and expected versus actual behavior.
Partner with engineers to troubleshoot and resolve complex failures.
Communicate testing status, known defects, coverage gaps, and release risks to Product, Engineering, and business stakeholders.
Maintain test data, ticket-to-test traceability, and known issues through resolution.
Mentor QA team members, share knowledge, and contribute to testing standards and continuous improvement.
Independently manage priorities, blockers, risks, and commitments.