Senior Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)

You will join Thinkific's Platform Engineering team as a Senior Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET). The team owns the foundation every other team builds on: AWS infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, Playwright test frameworks, and engineering standards that keep the Rails platform reliable.

Your goal will be to advocate for quality at all times and keep the development team accountable to QA best practices. You will:

• Lead the evolution of Thinkific's test automation strategy by designing scalable and maintainable automation frameworks for web, API, integration, and component level testing
• Develop advanced automation suites across front end, back end, services and integrations using modern tools such as Playwright, Cypress, Selenium or similar
• Drive improvements to the CI/CD delivery pipeline by optimizing build efficiency, reliability and parallelization
• Act as a technical mentor and coach for engineers and SDETs while elevating skills in test design, automation patterns and quality best practices
• Collaborate with Product Managers, Developers, QA and Operations to ensure clarity of requirements, testability and quality expectations
• Establish test strategies and quality guardrails for large features, system redesigns, architectural initiatives and cross team projects
• Introduce and evaluate new tools, frameworks and testing technologies through POCs and experimentation
• Influence long term quality direction by contributing to the QA automation roadmap and organizational testing strategy
• Champion observability and monitoring using tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, New Relic or similar to improve product reliability
• Lead root cause analysis for complex issues and ensure preventive automation is created as part of a continuous quality mindset
• Maintain and enforce quality assurance policies and procedures for consistency across teams and product areas

The person we have in mind likely:

• Has 5+ years of experience in automation and software testing, including building automation frameworks and guiding teams
• Demonstrates deep expertise in end-to-end testing, integration testing, API testing and service level automation using tools like Playwright, Cypress, Selenium or Protractor
• Has strong experience designing automated test frameworks for Ruby on Rails and React applications
• Understands modern software engineering principles, testing patterns, and automation architecture
• Has hands-on experience with CI and CD tools such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins or Semaphore and has optimized pipelines at scale
• Possesses strong knowledge of quality engineering including test strategy, testability analysis, test design patterns and risk based testing
• Has experience with monitoring, observability and log aggregation tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, New Relic or Airbrake
• Brings experience with performance and load testing using tools like JMeter, K6 or Gatling
• Is comfortable working in distributed systems, microservices or cloud based architectures
• Excels at mentorship, technical leadership and uplifting others through coaching and pairing
• Is a creative problem solver who thrives in ambiguous or fast moving environments
• Communicates effectively to influence cross team decisions and drive alignment
• Loves to learn, experiment, and explore new technologies while bringing fresh ideas to elevate quality across the organization

The recruitment compensation range for this position is $87,600 - 109,500 - 131,400 (this range is base salary only).