Sr. Test Engineer

Description: The Sr. Test Engineer leads the design, development, and execution of automated testing strategies across a complex, mission-critical cloud platform hosted in AWS GovCloud supporting 300+ applications and 130+ monthly production releases. This role ensures all platform and application changes are validated through comprehensive automated testing within CI/CD pipelines, including unit, integration, regression, performance, and security testing, while mentoring junior test engineers and driving continuous improvement in test automation coverage and reliability., * Lead the design and implementation of comprehensive automated testing strategies integrated into CI/CD pipelines across sandbox, staging, and production environments

• Develop and maintain automated unit, integration, regression, performance, and security test suites for platform services and hosted applications
• Ensure pipeline promotion processes enforce environment segregation with validated testing gates at each stage before production deployment
• Design and execute post-deployment production verification testing within two hours of each production change, documenting results and validation outcomes in associated change records
• Develop and maintain test automation frameworks that support 130+ monthly production releases across 3,000+ CI/CD pipelines
• Implement and maintain container image vulnerability scanning and Infrastructure as Code scanning within CI/CD pipelines
• Design and execute failover testing including tabletop exercises, controlled simulations, and live production drills, validating RTO, RPO, data integrity, and monitoring accuracy
• Validate system readiness prior to production deployments, patches, and upgrades ensuring all capabilities and services are not degraded or disrupted
• Design and execute disaster recovery and incident response testing exercises, documenting test results, corrective actions, and lessons learned
• Develop rollback validation procedures ensuring backout plans function correctly when executed
• Define success criteria, acceptance criteria, and production-readiness criteria for all platform changes and new capability deployments
• Collaborate with DevSecOps, SRE, and development teams to align testing requirements with deployment strategies including blue/green, canary, and rolling deployments
• Mentor and guide junior test engineers on test design, automation best practices, and platform-specific testing patterns
• Contribute to the reliability backlog by identifying recurring test failures, flaky tests, and automation improvement opportunities
• Participate in Agile and SAFe ceremonies including sprint planning, backlog refinement, demos, and retrospectives

• Demonstrated experience leading test automation and quality engineering for complex, mission-critical cloud platforms in Federal or enterprise environments
• Hands-on experience designing and implementing automated test suites within CI/CD pipelines for containerized, Kubernetes-based applications
• Proficiency with test automation frameworks and tools (Selenium, JUnit, TestNG, Cypress, or equivalent)
• Experience with performance testing tools (JMeter, Gatling, Locust, or equivalent)
• Experience with security testing integration including SAST, DAST, SCA, and container scanning tools within CI/CD workflows
• Knowledge of Kubernetes and EKS testing considerations including pod health validation, service mesh testing, and cluster upgrade verification
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code testing and validation practices
• Familiarity with disaster recovery and failover testing methodologies including tabletop exercises and live production drills
• Experience with CI/CD pipeline tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, or equivalent) and artifact management (Nexus or equivalent)
• Knowledge of version control systems (Git, Bitbucket, or equivalent)
• Experience working in Agile or SAFe environments with sprint-based delivery cadences
• ISTQB Advanced Test Automation Engineer or equivalent certification preferred
• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer or equivalent certification preferred
• Bachelor's Degree from an accredited academic institution with a minimum of 7 years of experience in test engineering or quality assurance, with at least 3 years leading test automation for cloud-native platforms in Federal or enterprise IT environments
• OR
• Associate's Degree from an accredited academic institution with a minimum of 9 years of experience in test engineering or quality assurance, with at least 4 years leading test automation for cloud-native platforms in Federal or enterprise IT environments, * Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) experience
• Active Personal Identity Verification (PIV) card
• Experience with post-deployment verification testing for platforms supporting 200+ applications
• Experience testing failover and disaster recovery procedures in AWS GovCloud multi-region environments