We are seeking a hands-on Senior QA / SDET to own quality engineering across our iOS and Android applications, backend microservices, APIs, third-party integrations, and end-to-end venue experiences for a major sports team and arena. This person will embed with product and engineering from sprint planning through production release, perform both manual and automated mobile testing, build and expand automation at the unit, integration, API, and mobile UI layers, and lead release readiness with other pod leads.
The ideal candidate combines strong automation engineering skills with a deliberate break things mindset. They look beyond the happy path, challenge assumptions, probe failure modes and edge cases, and use risk-based testing to prevent defects from reaching fans, staff, and venue operations. They are also AI-fluent and use platforms such as OpenAI, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and comparable tools to accelerate test design, automation development, execution, failure analysis, exploratory testing, and regression planning while applying sound engineering judgment.
What Success Looks Like
Quality is built into each sprint from planning and refinement through release, rather than treated as a final-stage checkpoint.
Manual and automated tests provide fast, reliable feedback across iOS, Android, unit, integration, API, mobile UI, and end-to-end workflows.
Release decisions are grounded in transparent quality gates, risk assessment, defect status, and cross-pod readiness.
Negative, boundary, resilience, and third-party failure scenarios receive the same rigor as happy-path validation.
Key Responsibilities
- Embedded Sprint Quality & Test Leadership
- Work closely with product managers, developers, designers, architects, and pod leads from sprint start to finish, making quality a shared team responsibility.
- Actively participate in backlog planning and refinement; provide testability feedback, clarify acceptance criteria, identify dependencies, surface risks, and define the required test approach before development begins.
- Translate user stories and technical designs into risk-based test strategies covering functional, integration, regression, usability, reliability, and failure-mode scenarios.
- Review feature designs and code changes for quality risks and automation opportunities; partner with developers on unit-test expectations and test data needs.
- Test features after developers merge code into the shared branch, validate acceptance criteria, execute targeted exploratory testing, and confirm readiness for broader regression and release.
- Lead, mentor, and establish consistent quality practices across QA engineers working within multiple pods such as Ticketing/Identity, Commerce/Payments, and Loyalty.
- Manual & Automated Mobile Testing
- Perform hands-on manual testing across both iOS and Android applications, including functional, exploratory, regression, usability, installation and upgrade, permissions, interruption, device and OS compatibility, and adverse network-condition testing.
- Validate mobile experiences on physical devices and emulators/simulators across representative device models, screen sizes, OS versions, application states, and platform-specific behaviors.
- Exercise negative and edge cases such as denied permissions, backgrounding and resuming, incoming interruptions, offline and degraded connectivity, session expiration, stale data, failed dependencies, and recovery behavior.
- Balance manual and automated testing based on risk, repeatability, feature maturity, and release timing; convert high-value repeatable manual scenarios into maintainable automation where appropriate.
- Create and maintain cross-platform mobile automation for Android and iOS using Appium, BrowserStack, Cucumber/Gherkin, Cucumber Pickles, TestNG, and comparable tooling.
- Automation Engineering
- Design, build, and maintain scalable test automation across unit, component, integration, API, contract, mobile UI, and end-to-end layers, with the right tests placed at the lowest practical level.
- Partner with developers to improve unit-test coverage, testability, dependency isolation, and fast feedback in pull-request and continuous integration workflows.
- Create robust API automation for REST services, including request/response validation, schemas, authentication and authorization, data integrity, error codes, idempotency, timeouts, retries, and downstream dependency failures.
- Build integration automation that validates service-to-service behavior, event-driven workflows, data persistence, queues/topics, and third-party contracts across system boundaries.
- Use BrowserStack, Cucumber, Gherkin feature specifications, Cucumber Pickles, Appium, TestNG, RestAssured, Allure, Jira, Git/Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, or comparable technologies.
- Leverage AI platforms and coding assistants such as OpenAI, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Codex, and comparable tools to generate test scenarios and automation code, identify coverage gaps, create negative and edge-case tests, analyze failures, maintain regression suites, and improve testing speed and effectiveness.
- Validate AI-generated tests and code for correctness, maintainability, security, determinism, and alignment with acceptance criteria before incorporating them into the automation suite.
- Develop reusable automation components, fixtures, test data utilities, mocks, service virtualization, and environment controls that reduce brittleness and accelerate execution.
- Continuously improve automation reliability by eliminating flaky tests, reducing execution time, strengthening diagnostics, and ensuring failures are actionable.
- Exploratory, Negative & Resilience Testing
- Apply a break things mentality: challenge assumptions and intentionally test malformed inputs, permission failures, interrupted flows, concurrency, poor connectivity, stale data, partial completion, dependency outages, and recovery behavior.
- Go beyond scripted happy-path cases by using exploratory testing, risk heuristics, boundary analysis, state-transition testing, and production-like scenarios.
- Validate API and integration failures, including 400-series and 500-series responses, vendor degradation, duplicate or out-of-order events, latency, retries, and fallback behavior.
- Capture defects with clear reproduction steps, expected and actual results, evidence, logs, impact, severity, and relevant environment or device details.
- Release Management & Quality Governance
- Lead release management and release readiness in partnership with other pod leads, coordinating cross-pod validation to ensure a high-quality launch.
- Own release test planning, entry and exit criteria, manual and automated regression scope, dependency checks, defect triage, risk documentation, stakeholder status, go/no-go recommendations, and post-release validation.
- Establish and enforce automated quality gates within CI/CD pipelines for pull requests, builds, environment promotion, and production releases.
- Define test certification processes for staging promotion and production deployment, with explicit handling for known defects, ignored tests, coverage debt, and time-bound remediation.
- Coordinate production smoke testing, event-day quality support, and post-release or post-event issue analysis; convert findings into preventive automation and process improvements.
- Report meaningful quality indicators such as automation coverage by layer, manual test completion, pass/fail trends, escaped defects, flaky tests, unresolved release risk, and defect aging.
- Third-Party, Venue & Event-Day Validation
- Define test strategies for third-party integrations such as Ticketmaster, Chase, and Adobe, including cases where vendor staging environments are limited or unavailable.
- Implement contract testing, mocks, stubs, and service virtualization to validate vendor behavior and failure modes without depending on every external system being available.
- Plan and execute on-site manual testing for IoT, biometric, ticketing, loyalty, payments, and frictionless commerce scenarios that cannot be fully validated remotely or automated.
- Create repeatable test scenarios for smart armrests, cameras, venue devices, and other physical dependencies, including clear evidence and rollback or contingency validation.
Required Qualifications
- 7+ years of experience in software quality assurance, quality engineering, or SDET roles, including 3+ years leading QA initiatives, release quality, or engineers across delivery teams.
- Demonstrated ability to design and code maintainable automation frameworks, not only execute prewritten test cases.
- Strong hands-on experience performing both manual and automated testing across iOS and Android, including exploratory and regression testing on physical devices and emulators/simulators, Appium automation, and cloud device platforms such as BrowserStack.
- Deep understanding of native mobile testing considerations including device and OS fragmentation, permissions, application lifecycle, installation and upgrade paths, interruptions, accessibility, network variability, and platform-specific behavior.
- Strong API and integration testing experience using RestAssured or comparable tools, including authentication, schema validation, error handling, data validation, and service dependencies.
- Experience with BDD using Cucumber and Gherkin, including feature design, step definitions, tags/hooks, scenario outlines, data tables, and the Cucumber Pickle execution model.
- Hands-on experience with a modern quality ecosystem that includes BrowserStack, Appium, Cucumber/Gherkin, Cucumber Pickles, RestAssured, TestNG, Allure, Jira, Git/Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, or comparable technologies.
- Demonstrated AI fluency, including practical use of platforms such as OpenAI, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and comparable tools to generate, execute, maintain, and improve software tests and test automation.
- Working knowledge of unit-testing principles and frameworks, with the ability to collaborate with developers on test design, testability, mocks, and coverage expectations.
- Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD workflows using Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or similar platforms.
- Strong understanding of microservices, REST APIs, distributed systems, and event-driven architectures; familiarity with Kafka or comparable messaging platforms.
- Experience establishing release quality gates, facilitating defect triage, and communicating release risk and go/no-go recommendations to technical and business stakeholders.
- Proficiency with Git-based version control and branching or pull-request workflows.
- Excellent communication, collaboration, problem-solving, and technical documentation skills.
- Bachelor s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Preferred Qualifications
- Hands-on backend engineering or backend test-automation experience, including service-level frameworks, database validation, message/event verification, test containers, mocks, and service virtualization. This is a significant advantage.
- Experience applying generative AI to software quality engineering, including test generation, coverage analysis, automation development, defect investigation, and release-readiness activities.
- Experience with contract testing tools such as Pact or Spring Cloud Contract.
- Experience testing payment processing, tokenization, PCI-sensitive flows, ticketing systems, biometric systems, IoT devices, or hardware integrations.
- Experience with performance, load, reliability, or resilience testing using JMeter, Gatling, k6, or similar tools.
- Experience using observability platforms such as Datadog or Application Insights to diagnose failures and validate system behavior.
- Background in sports, entertainment, venue technology, or other environments where systems must perform reliably during high-visibility live operations.
- Experience supporting production releases or live events with high-stakes reliability requirements.
Core Competencies
- Quality ownership and risk-based judgment
- Automation architecture and hands-on coding
- Manual and automated iOS and Android testing
- API, integration, and end-to-end testing
- Release leadership and cross-pod coordination
- Curiosity, skepticism, and a break things mindset
- Clear communication under high-stakes conditions
Additional Responsibilities
- Participate in OP monthly team meetings and participate in team-building efforts.
- Contribute to OP technical discussions, peer reviews, etc.
- Contribute content and collaborate via the OP-Wiki/Knowledge Base.
- Provide status reports to OP Account Management as requested.
About Us
At OP, we help you harness the power of technology for maximum impact. A technology consulting and solutions company, we offer advisory and managed services, innovative platforms, and staffing solutions across a wide range of fields including AI, cyber security, enterprise architecture, and beyond. For nearly two decades, we ve been challenging the status quo of the consulting industry, serving up fresh, ingenious thinking through a radically lean structure. Together, this strategy delivers unprecedented performance at an unparalleled pace for faster results that propel your business forward.