Senior Quality Assurance Analyst

About the role

Knowledge Services is seeking a Senior Quality Assurance Analyst (QA) for a long-term project in support of the State of Indiana. Applicants must be currently local to Indianapolis and able to work a hybrid work schedule with onsite presence weekly in downtown Indianapolis. This position does not accept candidates requiring C2C arrangements or visa sponsorship.

Responsibilities

• Test Strategy & Architecture
  • Design and own the master test strategy across functional, regression, integration, performance, security, and UAT workstreams.
  • Define quality gates, entry/exit criteria, and go/no-go frameworks for sprint releases and major deployments.
  • Establish traceability from requirements through test execution to defect closure.
• Test Automation
  • Design, build, and maintain automated UI regression suites (Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, or equivalent).
  • Develop and maintain API test automation (Postman, RestAssured, or SoapUI) for backend services and system integrations.
  • Integrate automated suites into the CI/CD pipeline (Azure DevOps, Jenkins, or equivalent); automate regression gates at each build promotion.
• Manual & Specialized Testing
  • Lead functional, integration, end-to-end, and exploratory testing across concurrent workstreams.
  • Execute performance/load testing (JMeter, LoadRunner, or equivalent) to validate scalability under peak usage.
  • Perform SQL-based data integrity testing to verify backend accuracy, transformation logic, and data governance compliance.
• Defect Management & Reporting
  • Own the full defect lifecycle: triage, prioritization, tracking, root cause analysis, and closure verification.
  • Deliver test execution reports, defect density analyses, and release readiness summaries to project leadership and stakeholders.
  • Maintain and report QA metrics: defect escape rate, test coverage, automation coverage ratio, and mean time to detect/resolve.
• UAT & Stakeholder Engagement
  • Plan and facilitate UAT with business users; manage session scheduling, issue capture, resolution tracking, and formal sign-off.
  • Serve as primary QA liaison to program staff; communicate testing progress, risk exposure, and quality posture at all project levels.
• Team & Quality Leadership
  • Mentor junior QA staff; establish automation code standards, peer review practices, and a shared Q