Senior QA Automation Engineer

AutoTec | Birmingham, AL | Hybrid (4 days in-office)

Reports to: QA Manager

Why People Join AutoTec

• Industry domain: Auto auctions are fascinating if you care about marketplaces, real-time systems, and regulated industries
• Stability: 70 year old company with consistent revenue and realistic growth plans (not a startup burning cash)
• Team size: Small enough that you know everyone, large enough to have specialized roles
• Local impact: Birmingham-based company serving clients across the US
• Work-life balance: We average 20 days of PTO used annually (yes, we track this to ensure people actually take time off) plus 7.5 holidays

The Problem We're Solving

AutoTec builds software for auto auctions, dealers, and insurance providers - industries where downtime during a live auction costs customers real money and bugs in insurance calculations create regulatory nightmares. We're scaling our SaaS platforms from handling hundreds of simultaneous users to thousands, and our current mix of manual testing and limited automation can't keep pace.

We need someone who can build a modern automated testing program that lets us ship faster without breaking production. If you've ever inherited a codebase with 30% test coverage and thought "I could fix this," this role is for you.

What You'll Actually Do

Build the automation foundation (60% of your time)

• Design and implement automated test frameworks for our auction management SaaS platform and dealer tools using Playwright and Cypress
• API test automation for our RESTful and GraphQL services (we're moving dealer registration, and insurance policy management to API-first architecture)
• Establish test coverage goals and get us from current 35% automated coverage to 75% over the next 18 months
• Own the testing strategy - if you believe we need visual regression testing, contract testing, or something else, you have the authority to implement it

Performance and load testing (20% of your time)

• Build load testing frameworks to simulate auction day traffic spikes (we need to handle 5,000 simultaneous users during major sale events)
• Identify performance bottlenecks before they hit production
• Work with infrastructure team to establish performance baselines and SLAs

Embedded quality engineering (20% of your time)

• Work directly with developers during project planning to define testability requirements
• Review code and architecture designs with a QA lens before implementation
• Run exploratory testing sessions on new features before release
• Participate in incident post-mortems to identify where testing gaps allowed bugs through

You won't be:

• A manual tester executing someone else's test plans
• The "last line of defense" gate before releases (we're moving toward continuous deployment)
• Isolated from the development process
• Expected to automate everything - strategic manual exploratory testing still matters

The Technical Environment

What you'll be testing:

• Web applications (React frontends talking to GraphQL APIs)
• RESTful and GraphQL APIs serving mobile apps and third-party integrations
• Background job processing for auction settlements and insurance policy renewals

Current stack:

• Automation: Cypress, Playwright, Postman (we're standardizing on Playwright going forward)
• CI/CD: Bitbucket Pipelines (tests run on every PR, blocking merge if critical tests fail)
• Monitoring: Jira for defects, TestRail for test case management
• Performance: Currently ad-hoc JMeter scripts (you'll formalize this)
• Version Control: Git with feature branch workflow
• Languages: TypeScript/JavaScript, Python, React, Bash, YAML, etc.
• AI: Claude Code for test generation and debugging

Release cadence: Agile Kanban with releases to production twice weekly

What Makes This Role Different

Real autonomy: You're not executing someone else's test plan. You're designing the testing strategy for a product suite serving thousands of daily users. If you have a better approach, you can implement it.

Immediate impact: Your work directly determines release velocity and production stability. No bureaucracy, no waiting for approvals across 5 layers.

Modern practices: We're actively shifting left, investing in automation, and treating QA as engineering. You won't be fighting to get developers to care about quality.

AI-forward tooling: We actively use AI assistants like Claude Code to accelerate development. You're expected to leverage these tools strategically and evaluate when AI helps vs. when human judgment is essential.

Team quality: Our developers write tests for their own code, and respect QA as partners. You won't be fighting the "just test it faster" mentality.

What Success Looks Like

First 90 days:

• Get comfortable with our applications and common failure modes
• Write automated tests for our top 3 user workflows
• Identify the biggest testing gaps and propose a roadmap

First 6 months:

• Establish baseline test coverage metrics and show measurable improvement
• Implement automated smoke tests that run on every deployment
• Reduce production bugs by 25% through better pre-release detection

First year:

• Own the entire test automation strategy
• Enable the team to release weekly instead of bi-weekly without increasing defect rate
• Mentor junior QA team members on automation best practices

The Honest Challenges

• You'll be building, not inheriting: We don't have a mature automation program. You'll create it. Some people love this, others want something established.
• In-office 4 days: If you want fully remote, this isn't the role. We value face-to-face collaboration for a small team.
• Industry learning curve: Auto auctions and dealer finance have domain complexity. You'll need to learn the business to test effectively.
• Technical debt: Our applications weren't built with testability in mind. You'll work with developers to improve this over time.

Benefits

• Health, dental, vision
• 401(k) with 3% 3% company match
• Company-paid long-term and short-term disability
• Unlimited PTO
• Hybrid schedule: 4 days in Birmingham office, 1 day remote
• Modern equipment (you'll get what you need to do the job)
• Professional development budget for conferences, certifications, and training

The Interview Process

1. Phone screen with recruiter (20 min) - Basic fit and logistics
2. Technical discussion with QA Manager (60 min) - Your background, our challenges, mutual assessment
3. Practical exercise (60 min) - Write automation for a simple scenario using our stack
4. Meet the team (30 min) - Talk with developers and QA teammates you'd work with
5. Offer or feedback within 48 hours

Total time investment: ~4 hours. We respect that you're evaluating multiple opportunities.

Questions about the role? Alberto Coutoumanos (HR Director) is happy to discuss before you apply: acoutoumanos@autotec.com

AutoTec is an equal opportunity employer.

Required Experience

• 5 years in QA with at least 3 years focused on test automation
• Strong coding ability in JavaScript/TypeScript, or Python - you'll write real code daily, not just record/playback scripts
• Production experience with modern test frameworks (Playwright, Cypress, or Selenium WebDriver)
• API testing experience with REST and GraphQL services
• CI/CD integration experience - your tests need to run in pipelines, not just locally
• Performance testing foundation - even basic JMeter or k6 experience counts

Nice to Have

• Experience testing financial or regulated software (insurance, lending, payments)
• Background in the automotive industry or marketplaces
• Familiarity with Python backends (helps with debugging)
• ISTQB Certification
• Performance testing at scale (10K concurrent users)
• Experience building testing programs from scratch