Senior QA Automation Engineer

About the role

Private Identity (“PrivateID”) builds privacy-preserving identity and age-assurance technology — verification that confirms who someone is, or that they meet an age requirement, without storing the underlying personal data. Our software runs in production at consumer scale for some of the largest companies in the world, and we hold ourselves to the quality bar this demands: Private Identity is ISO 27001, ISO 9001 and SOC 2 Type II certified, and a Kantara-certified NIST SP 800-63 credential service provider. We’re a small, senior, international team, HQ in Washington DC, who work in the open, write things down, and ship software that works the first time. The role You’ll be a Private Identity engineer embedded three days a week with a large customer’s in-store platform team in Woonsocket, RI, and working from home the other two. You are our quality gate inside the account: the person who makes sure every build we ship lands cleanly, gets tested thoroughly, and arrives with the clear write-up that keeps both teams in sync.

Responsibilities

• Test every build we ship — receive new builds from engineering leads (Ubuntu workstation software and companion Android app), install on test hardware, run a focused manual smoke pass (install/upgrade, first launch, core flows, camera/video paths).
• Write and run Playwright tests (TypeScript) covering UI and API surface; this is where most of your time goes.
• Validate each release against requirements and acceptance criteria and provide a clear, evidence‑backed go/no‑go before it reaches the customer.
• Triage failures, reproduce them, isolate root cause where possible, and write defect reports that engineers in other time zones can act on immediately.
• Be the bridge between two small teams: work side‑by‑side with the customer’s engineering and QA team on test approach, coverage, standards, hand‑off criteria; be the first person they come to when something looks off.
• Keep the Private Identity team current from the customer site: what’s been tested, what’s outstanding, what’s at risk — early, in writing, with enough context to act on.
• When the customer is working an operational issue in production, be part of the response (occasionally early morning or late evening).
• Own the automation framework & CI/CD: design and maintain the Playwright‑based UI/API automation framework (TypeScript/JavaScript), with Postman/Bruno or similar for exploratory API work.
• Wire regression and smoke suites into CI/CD (GitHub Actions) so quality checks are repeatable and visible to both teams.
• Spot coverage gaps and close them; contribute to test strategy and quality‑engineering practice in an Agile/Scrum cadence.
• Document issues, workflows and processes (defect reports, coverage maps, test plans, runbooks, process notes) so someone who wasn’t in the room can follow them.
• Maintain a single, accurate picture of what’s been tested, what’s outstanding and what’s at risk; share it before anyone has to ask.
• Run your corner of the engagement like a well‑kept lab notebook: tidy backlog, clear priorities, nothing lost between hand