Senior QA Automation Engineer

Sustainment•Austin, TX

About The Position

Sustainment is seeking a senior, hands-on QA automation engineer to lead the development of a fully automated Playwright test suite, supporting a daily release cadence for their AI-native software platform. This platform helps US-based manufacturers find and work with critical suppliers to build and manage supply chains, serving both commercial and federal/defense customers. The role is a player-coach position, with approximately 80% hands-on testing and automation work and 20% leadership, including mentoring a small QA team and owning the QA process. The primary focus is on testing and automation, with a secondary focus on leadership.

Requirements

6+ years of senior-level experience in QA and test automation.
Deep hands-on skill with modern test-automation frameworks (Playwright preferred, Cypress, or similar) and API testing.
Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines (GitLab a plus).
A track record of building an automated suite from partial or manual coverage.
Comfort staying hands-on with testing and building automation.
Some experience mentoring engineers or owning QA processes for a small team.
Comfort with Jira for test and defect management.
Eligibility to obtain and maintain a U.S. Secret or Top Secret security clearance.
Authorization to work for any employer in the U.S.

Nice To Haves

Experience with AI-assisted testing tools and workflows.
Experience delivering into regulated/federal environments (FedRAMP, CUI, DoD).
B2B SaaS and/or manufacturing / supply-chain domain experience.
Exposure to data or analytics testing.
Experience testing agentic / multi-agent systems and prompt-driven workflows.
Experience with AI-assisted test generation using LLMs or agents.
Experience with ML / data-quality testing, including model-output validation and extraction/classification accuracy metrics.
Experience testing and evaluating GenAI / LLM-powered features, including building evaluation harnesses, ground-truth datasets, and scoring for non-deterministic model outputs.

Responsibilities

Drive the shift from mostly-manual testing to a comprehensive, fully automated Playwright test suite.
Build, maintain, and scale automated tests (UI and API) and integrate them into the CI/CD pipeline.
Contribute to manual and exploratory testing, especially on releases and where automated coverage is lacking.
Stand up QA quality instrumentation, such as escaped-defect tracking, to measure shipped quality.
Champion AI-assisted testing as the company moves toward AI-native development.
Mentor two QA engineers and enhance the team's automation capabilities.
Own and standardize QA processes and standards, including test plans, entry/exit criteria, bounce-back vs. hold guidelines, and QA's definition of done.
Act as the QA operational lead and a trusted advisor to the Director of Engineering.