Staff/Senior SDET

Location: Palo Alto

Department: Engineering

Company Overview
We are a high-growth company building the way complex physical businesses are run. This is an opportunity to do work that's disrupting industries — scaling a business by increasing the number of devices, events, applications, services, and traffic that drive measurable success for our customers. We have some of the best minds in AI, IoT, Cloud, and Mobile, who have built leading products at companies like Amazon Alexa, Meta/Facebook, SmartThings, and Samsung.

Position Overview
We are seeking a Staff/Senior SDET to join our growing team. This is a hands-on, builder-first role — you'll spend most of your time testing and writing code: designing and building test automation frameworks, custom tooling, and infrastructure that scales quality across web, API, mobile, cloud, and hardware. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with engineering to bake testability into the product itself, not just verify it after the fact. This position requires daily hands-on work with BrightAI custom hardware devices and systems, and does not accommodate fully remote work.

 

Key Responsibilities 

- Responsible for delivering the highest quality of the company's flagship products.

- Design, build, and maintain test automation frameworks and custom tooling spanning web, API, mobile, and cloud (AWS) surfaces.

- Build and maintain hardware-in-the-loop test rigs and automation for custom hardware devices — flashing firmware/images, wiring up test harnesses, and automating physical test scenarios.

- Write test code and treat test infrastructure as a real engineering product with its own architecture, code review, and CI/CD.

- Partner directly with engineering to embed testability into system design early, and to debug failures down to root cause across the stack.

- Use AI-assisted development tools to accelerate test authoring, tooling development, and triage.

- Design verification suites for releases as they promote through staging and production, and build dashboards/metrics that give engineering leadership a real-time read on quality and release risk.

- Investigate and prototype computer vision-based testing approaches where applicable (e.g., visual regression, camera/sensor validation) — a strong plus, not required.

- Continuously raise the bar on test coverage, flakiness, and execution speed; retire brittle manual processes in favor of automation and tooling.

- Contribute to retrospectives and postmortems to improve the SDLC — increasing velocity while managing risk.

 

Qualifications

- Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field (advanced degree a plus), or equivalent hands-on experience.

- 5-7+ years of experience as an SDET, test automation engineer, or software engineer with a strong quality/testing focus.

- Strong software engineering fundamentals — comfortable writing and reviewing production-grade code, not just test scripts.

- Hands-on experience building automation frameworks with tools like Playwright, Selenium, Appium, or similar, across web, API, and mobile.

- Proficiency in Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or similar languages.

- Experience testing hardware or embedded/IoT systems — firmware/image flashing, physical test rigs, device bring-up, or similar.

- Solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines and how automated testing integrates into the delivery lifecycle.

- Comfortable using AI tools (Claude Code, CoWork, Skills etc.), familiar with agentic AI, and able to leverage AI as part of a daily workflow.

- Computer vision and audio/image/video processing experience (OpenCV or similar) is a strong plus.

- Strong debugging and root-cause analysis skills across full-stack and hardware/software boundaries.

 

What We're Looking For Beyond the Resume

We're looking for someone who doesn't wait for a fully-specified ticket — you can operate with ambiguous or incomplete requirements, figure out what "done" should look like, and dig up the information you need rather than waiting for someone to hand it to you. You treat the quality of the product like it's your own, end to end, and keep the customer's experience in mind when deciding what to test and prioritize. You're focused on outcomes, not just activity, and you look for simpler, more automated ways to solve problems instead of adding processes or relying on repeatable manual testing. You can also see how today's tooling decisions will scale as the product and hardware fleet grow. If you're passionate about quality, invention, and hands-on engineering, we'd love to hear from you!