Senior QA Engineer

Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States

Department: Software

Workplace: hybrid

Employment Type: full

Description

We're looking for a Senior QA Engineer to own quality for a significant area of our platform — the web application, admin tooling, and the integrations our customers depend on. This is a senior individual contributor role: you'll set the testing approach for your area rather than execute someone else's, and you'll be the person the squad turns to when the question is "what could this break?"

The craft here is still hands-on testing — exploratory work, risk-based coverage decisions, and the kind of deep product knowledge that catches the defect nobody wrote a test case for. What makes it senior is scope and influence: you'll define test strategy, push quality earlier into the development cycle, and make the judgment calls on release risk that others rely on.

What You'll Do

• Own the test strategy — deciding what gets deep coverage, what gets a smoke check, and what we consciously accept risk on, then defending those calls with reasoning rather than instinct.
• Lead exploratory and risk-based testing across multi-tenant data separation, role-based permissions, complex customer workflows, and the seams between systems where defects actually live.
• Design and implement test plans and cases and raise the standard of the team's existing cases through review and refactoring.
• Shift quality left — reviewing requirements and designs early, challenging ambiguous acceptance criteria before a line of code is written, and making the case for testability in design discussions.
• Own release risk assessment on go/no-go calls: what was tested, what wasn't, what the residual risk is, and whether it's acceptable. Senior means your assessment carries weight.
• Write exemplary bug reports with clear reproduction steps, environment details, evidence, and a considered severity and priority — and triage incoming defects for the team.
• Own and curate the regression suite so it stays fast, meaningful, and trusted; retire cases that no longer earn their place and identify the highest-value candidates for automation.
• Test APIs and integrations using Postman or similar — validating payloads, status codes, error handling, and contract behavior between services.
• Query the database to validate data directly, investigate discrepancies, and build the test data the team needs.
• Improve QA practice — identify recurring failure patterns, propose process changes, and drive them to adoption. You'll be expected to improve how we work, not just work within it.
• Partner with Support and Product on escalated customer issues, reproducing hard-to-pin-down problems and feeding what you learn back into test coverage.

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on software QA experience, with meaningful time testing a complex web application.
• A track record of owning quality for a product area independently — setting the approach, not just executing a plan handed to you.
• Strong risk-based testing judgment: you can articulate why you tested what you tested, and what you deliberately left uncovered.
• Deep command of QA fundamentals: test planning and design techniques, boundary and negative testing, equivalence partitioning, severity vs. priority, and the defect lifecycle.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including the credibility and comfort to tell a room that a release isn't ready — and to explain why.
• Hands-on experience with automation tools ( Github Actions, Playwright)) — enough to read, run, and evaluate a suite even if you don't build it.
• Working knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and where testing fits within them.
• Proficiency with a bug tracking and test management toolchain (Jira, confluence, github)
• Solid API testing skills with Postman or similar, and working with SQL for data validation.
• Fluency with browser developer tools and application logs — you can usually tell the team whether an issue is front-end, back-end, or data before they open it.
• Experience in an Agile/Scrum environment with frequent releases.

Nice to Have

• Senior QA experience in B2B SaaS, particularly with multi-tenant architecture, role-based permissions, or subscription and billing flows.
• Experience identifying automation candidates and collaborating with engineers on coverage strategy.
• Experience testing third-party integrations, webhooks, or SSO/SAML.
• Performance or security testing exposure.
• Accessibility testing against WCAG guidelines.
• ISTQB Advanced Level (Test Analyst) or comparable depth of training.

Benefits

• Health/dental/vision insurance

• 401(k)

• Equity/stock options

• Flexible PTO

• Hybrid work