Senior QA Automation Engineer - Cloud & Infrastructure Platforms (DoD / GovCloud)

NALEJ • Arlington, VA

8d • Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking a Senior QA Automation Engineer to design, architect, and maintain comprehensive test automation frameworks and custom tooling for cloud-native platforms. The role works across AWS Commercial and GovCloud (IL2–IL5) environments to ensure the reliability, security, and performance of microservices and data platforms deployed on Kubernetes and Docker.

Within an AI-native development ecosystem, the engineer will create Python test harnesses, orchestrate containerized test fixtures, and integrate autonomous AI agents into verification pipelines for test generation, API fuzzing, and regression analysis. The position also embeds automated quality checks in CI/CD workflows and collaborates with platform and security teams on security testing and DoD NIST 800-53 compliance validation.

Requirements

• 5–8+ years of dedicated software quality engineering and test automation experience.
• U.S. citizenship required; must be capable of obtaining and maintaining a DoD security clearance. Prior clearance history is not required.
• Advanced proficiency in Python for framework development, custom test harnesses, and CLI tooling, including pytest, pydantic, requests/httpx, and asyncio.
• Proven track record building custom test automation frameworks and tooling from scratch in Python.
• Strong hands-on experience testing applications in pure Docker and Kubernetes environments, including automated provisioning of ephemeral test dependencies.
• Deep knowledge of testing RESTful APIs, gRPC services, WebSocket connections, and asynchronous event streams.
• Experience with GitLab CI/CD pipelines, container registries, artifact management, and automated test reporting dashboards.
• High autonomy as an individual contributor, with the ability to establish quality standards and mentor teams.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with or strong interest in using AI coding assistants and autonomous testing agents to accelerate QA cycles.

Responsibilities

• Architect and maintain scalable, customized Python test automation frameworks and CLI tools, including custom runners and asynchronous HTTP/gRPC clients.
• Build automated end-to-end integration and system test suites for Docker and Kubernetes environments, including AWS EKS, validating service discovery, networking, and resilience.
• Implement contract, functional, and regression tests for REST, gRPC, and event-driven architectures such as Kafka, verifying schema fidelity and backward compatibility.
• Integrate AI agents and LLM tooling into QA workflows to generate synthetic test datasets, discover edge cases, and produce automated test suites.
• Embed smoke, integration, load, and security test stages into GitLab CI pipelines and establish automated quality gates.
• Collaborate with platform and security teams to automate security testing, including SAST/DAST and container vulnerability scanning, and compliance validation aligned with DoD NIST 800-53 standards.
• Establish quality standards and mentor teams on automated testing best practices.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed