Sr Software Quality Engineer

About the role

We are looking for an experienced Senior QA Automation to drive quality engineering across our Digital ecosystem, including e-commerce, mobile applications, APIs, Third-party integrations, and emerging AI-powered customer experiences. This ideal candidate will define and execute an automation-first with AI-enabled quality strategy, scale the existing automation frameworks, improve test coverage and release confidence, and lead quality engineering initiatives across multiple teams. This is a hands-on technical lead role with strong experience in UI, mobile, API, service integration and end-to-end testing, combined with strong knowledge of modern AI-assisted test automation frameworks.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and implement the Automation strategy across e-commerce, mobile, APIs, backend services, and other third-party integrations.
• Establish automation as the primary approach for regression, functional, integration, and end-to-end testing.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, Architecture and DevOps teams to establish quality standards and release readiness criteria.
• Drive shift-left testing, continuous testing, and quality ownership throughout the SDLC.
• Define automation KPIs including automation coverage, defect leakage, execution time, flaky-test rate, escaped defects, and release quality.
• Mentor QA engineers and establish engineering standards, reusable frameworks, and best practices.

Web / E-Commerce Automation

• Lead automation for Michaels.com digital commerce experiences.
• Build scalable UI automation using modern frameworks such as Playwright.
• Establish cross-browser, responsive, accessibility, and end-to-end automation strategies.

Mobile Application Quality

• Own automation strategy for iOS and Android mobile applications using Appium.
• Validate mobile-specific functionality.
• Establish device/browser coverage strategy using cloud platforms such as Sauce Labs or equivalent.

API / Backend / Microservices Testing

• Build automation using Playwright API, Postman/Newman, Karate using JavaScript/TypeScript.
• Validate service-to-service integrations, databases, messaging, inventory, pricing, order management, payment, and fulfillment workflows.
• Implement contract testing and integration testing for distributed services and integrate API automation into CI/CD pipelines.

AI-Enabled Quality Engineering

• Establish an AI-first QA automation strategy using modern GenAI tools.
• Use AI coding assistants and agentic development tools to accelerate: test-case generation, test-data generation, automation script generation, API test creation, regression optimization, failure triage, test maintenance, and documentation.
• Evaluate and implement AI-enabled testing solutions such as GitHub Copilot, Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Amazon Q, or equivalent open-source LLMs.
• Implement AI-assisted test generation and intelligent regression selection.
• Explore LLM/GenAI application testing, including prompt validation, hallucination testing, response accuracy, safety, grounding, and consistency.
• Use Playwright MCP and agentic automation where appropriate to connect AI tools with testing frameworks and engineering workflows.

CI/CD & DevOps

• Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines and establish quality gates for sprint releases.
• Implement parallel and distributed test execution to reduce regression cycle time.
• Integrate automation with tools such as GitHub/GitLab, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, or equivalent platforms.

Qualifications

Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, Information Technology, or equivalent practical experience.

Technical Skills

Automation:

• Strong hands-on experience in Playwright using JavaScript/TypeScript.
• Experience designing scalable automation frameworks (Page Object Model / component-based automation).
• Parallel execution, distributed testing and CI/CD integration.

AI / GenAI:

• Strong working knowledge of modern AI development and QA tools, including several of: GitHub Copilot; Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude or Cursor or any open-sourced LLMs.
• AI-powered test generation.
• Prompt engineering.
• AI agent testing.
• MCP.
• AI-assisted debugging and root-cause analysis.
• Agentic QA automation.

Experience

• 5+ years of experience in quality assurance (required).
• Quality assurance of retail technology or e-commerce application (preferred).
• Experience working with retail POS systems, e-commerce platforms, or other retail technology solutions (preferred).

Skills

• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, with a keen attention to detail.
• Good communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to effectively collaborate with cross-functional teams.
• Proven ability to work in a fast-paced, agile environment and manage multiple priorities effectively.

Certifications

• ISTQB or other relevant certifications in software testing (preferred).

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (preferred).