Senior QA Automation Engineer

Job Title: Senior QA Automation Engineer

Location: Remote (United States)

Reports To: Engineering Manager

Department: Product Development

FLSA Status: Exempt

Planet Depos is a leading global court reporting firm that harnesses innovative technology to streamline proceedings and deliver better outcomes for clients. As the only international firm led by industry experts, our team is dedicated to reshaping the field with cutting-edge, technology-driven services, including Planet Pro™, our AI-powered litigation technology suite. Planet Depos is building new software to replace a legacy platform, and we are shipping it every sprint. 

We need a Senior QA Automation Engineer to build the automated tests that tell us, quickly and reliably, whether a change is ready to release. You will sit on one of our product teams and build test automation that all of our teams use: writing and running tests at the API and UI levels, putting them into our CI/CD pipelines, and working with engineers across the teams and an external QA team that covers overnight hours.

ESSENTIAL JOB RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Design, build and maintain automated tests for our web applications and APIs across all product teams: end-to-end UI tests, API and integration tests.
• Set up shared automation patterns, tools and conventions that every team can use, and help engineers on each team write and maintain their own tests.
• Turn acceptance criteria and manual test cases into automated tests, and decide with the team what to automate and what to leave manual.
• Run automation in the CI/CD pipelines so every change gets fast feedback, and keep the suite fast and reliable; find and fix the causes of flaky tests.
• Build regression coverage for release testing in the test environments, and give release-readiness input backed by test results.
• Build automated checks that data matches between the legacy system and the new one during migration.
• Create test data and environment setup so tests can be repeated.
• Write clear, reproducible defect reports and work with engineers to triage and fix them.
• Work with an external QA team across time zones: hand over automated coverage, and automate the manual cases they run most.
• Report on test coverage and suite health in terms the teams can act on.
• Help product owners and engineers write acceptance criteria that can be tested, and document how the automation works.
• Coaching developers to write and own their tests, including tests written with agents.
• Gates. Helping us decide where the quality gates belong in the pipeline, and keeping the standards high so a passing build means something.
• The in-between tests. Finding where integration and contract tests fit, between unit tests and full UI tests, since that's where a lot of valuable coverage tends to get missed.
• Standards and best practices that every team follows, with this person setting the example and reviewing rather than carrying all the writing.

QUALIFICATIONS:

Required (all three, with specific examples):

• Automation you built and kept running. 5+ years in software QA or test engineering, including 3+ years writing automated tests in code. For example: a suite you built from the start and how it was maintained; how you kept it fast; a flaky test you fixed and what caused it.
• Testing web applications and APIs at more than one level. You know when a test belongs at the API level and when at the UI. For example: how you split coverage between API and UI tests; how you managed test data; a defect your automation caught that manual testing missed.
• Automation in CI/CD. Your tests run on every change and the team trusts the results. For example: a pipeline you added tests to; how you handled failures that blocked merges; how you reported results to the team.

Also required:

• Strong programming skills in a language used for test automation (for example TypeScript or Python).
• Clear written and verbal communication, including with teammates in other time zones.
• Comfortable working with product owners and engineers across several teams, and with an external QA team.
• A degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Preferred:

• A modern end-to-end testing framework (for example Playwright, Cypress or Selenium).
• API testing frameworks, and unit and integration testing alongside developers.
• Testing web applications, REST APIs and event-driven or message-based systems.
• Testing data migrations and verifying that data matches between old and new systems.
• CI/CD pipelines, feature flags and trunk-based development.
• Performance, accessibility or security testing.
• Agile Scrum teams; Jira for test and defect tracking.
• Experience as the first QA hire, or building test automation from scratch and rolling it out across several teams.
• Legal technology, court reporting, or document and transcript workflows.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS:

• $145,000-$185,000 per year, commensurate with experience.

Planet Depos also offers a comprehensive benefits package:

• Medical insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• Health Savings Account
• Voluntary Term Life Insurance
• Voluntary Long-Term Disability
• Paid Time Off
• Paid Holidays
• 401(k)
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)