Senior Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)

Topstep

3h•$155,000 - $190,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Topstep operates a real-time futures trading platform (TopstepX). We are hiring a Senior SDET to drive test automation across the platform, building frameworks, shaping coverage decisions, and raising the quality bar. The role involves partnering with product engineering teams to design for testability early, automate key user journeys, and strengthen the testing practice. This role suits a strong technical tester who thinks in systems, can build scalable test infrastructure, and mentor others. The company leans heavily on AI-assisted test generation and this role will help extend that capability.

Requirements

5 + years in software testing with a strong focus on test automation and framework development.
Expert programming skills; writes production-quality test code in TypeScript.
Hands-on experience building test automation frameworks from scratch (Playwright preferred; Cypress, Selenium, or similar also relevant).
Comfort using AI/LLM-assisted tooling to accelerate test creation and verification, with the judgment to validate and curate generated output rather than accept it at face value.
Strong API and real-time testing: RESTful services and WebSocket/streaming systems, with a solid grasp of backend testing patterns.
Solid grasp of our stack — a React/TypeScript front end and C#/.NET backend services, plus databases and the service architecture behind them — enough to test it deeply.
CI/CD experience integrating automated tests into deployment pipelines (GitHub Actions).
Proven ability to design test strategies that balance coverage, execution time, and maintenance overhead.
Strong debugging across the full stack — frontend, backend, database, and infrastructure.
Excellent communication; can advocate for quality and influence engineering practice.

Nice To Haves

Non-functional testing experience: performance, load, and resilience.
Familiarity with ArgoCD, Terraform, and Kubernetes.
Experience testing trading, fintech, or other low-latency/financially sensitive systems.
Contract / consumer-driven testing between services.
Observability-driven testing (using logs, metrics, traces to validate behavior).

Responsibilities

Drive test automation across API, UI, and end-to-end, shaping where automated coverage delivers the most value against execution time and maintenance cost.
Use and extend AI-assisted test-generation tooling to produce and maintain broad, verification-focused coverage, applying judgment to curate, validate, and prune generated output.
Build and maintain scalable test frameworks and infrastructure that run in CI/CD, including for real-time paths: order lifecycle, market-data streams over WebSocket, and financially material calculations.
Partner with product and engineering early to define testability requirements and quality standards.
Lead by example on test code quality — clean, maintainable, well-documented, and a model for the team.
Own the signal from the test suite: triage failures fast, keep flakiness low, and make results and quality metrics visible and trustworthy to engineering.
Surface and drive resolution of quality gaps, systemic testing weaknesses, and test-related technical debt.
Mentor engineers and SDETs on automation patterns, AI-assisted testing workflows, non-functional testing (performance, load, resilience), and a quality-first mindset.