Overview
Why AAA Life
AAA Life is a respected and trusted American brand that has been focusing on Life Insurance and Annuity Products since 1969. At AAA Life we have over 1.8 million policies where we take pride in earning the trust of our policyholders who understand our promise to be there for them – and their families – when we’re needed most. By joining the AAA Life team, you are joining a company that genuinely cares about helping each other, with a devotion to protect the lives of those around us. We embrace a diverse, equitable, inclusive culture where all associates can feel a sense of belonging and use their unique talents and perspective to influence, innovate, motivate, and thrive.
How You’ll WorkWork Solution: Hybrid (Tuesday- Thursday) or Remote (USA)Relocation Eligibility: Available
The Senior SDET is a technical leader within Quality Assurance. You will design and deliver scalable automation frameworks and test solutions that validate end-to-end user journeys across UI, API, and integrations, and you will embed those tests within GitLab CI/CD pipelines. In partnership with product, engineering and DevOps, you will drive shift-left testing, improve testability and observability, lead investigations into complex defects and incidents, and mentor other SDETs and QA analysts to raise the team’s overall engineering and quality bar.
Responsibilities
Position Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain robust, reusable automation frameworks for UI, API, contract, integration, and regression testing.
- Implement and maintain automated test suites that execute reliably in GitLab CI/CD; optimize test execution for speed, parallelism, and stability.
- Act as a feature-level test lead: design end-to-end test strategies that cover front-end, back-end, and third-party integrations and validate real user journeys.
- Influence system and feature design for testability by recommending test hooks, dependency injection, improved logging/telemetry, and other patterns that enable automation and observability.
- Lead root cause analysis for complex defects and production incidents; coordinate remediation, post-mortems, and preventive measures.
- Collaborate closely with DevOps and platform teams to provision stable test environments, enable containerized test execution (Docker), and manage CI/CD test jobs.
- Contribute to performance and load testing initiatives (JMeter, Gatling, or similar) and incorporate results into release readiness decisions.
- Mentor and coach SDETs and QA analysts; conduct test code reviews and enforce coding and testing best practices.
- Advocate and implement continuous testing practices and quality gates (e.g., critical test pass/fail gates) across the pipeline.
- Define, track, and act on quality metrics (defect escape rate, flaky test rate, execution time, coverage trends) to drive continuous improvement.
Core Competencies
- Technical Execution & Automation: Expert at building reliable test frameworks and test code that is maintainable, secure, and performant.
- Testing & Quality Strategy: Able to create risk-based test strategies that include functional and non-functional testing (performance, security, reliability).
- System Design for Testability: Understands end-to-end architecture; proactively drives design decisions that make systems easier to test and observe.
- Tooling & CI/CD: Deep experience integrating tests into CI/CD (GitLab); ability to design test pipelines, troubleshoot pipeline issues, and improve test infrastructure.
- Domain Awareness: Applies business and domain knowledge to prioritize tests and design scenarios that reflect real member use cases and regulatory needs.
- Collaboration & Influence: Partners effectively with product, engineering, and platform teams; influences implementation and release decisions through evidence and persuasion.
- Leadership & Mentoring: Coaches peers, leads technical initiatives, runs workshops, and elevates QA capability across teams.
- Ownership & Accountability: Drives issues to resolution; leads post-mortems and implements process and tooling changes to reduce recurrence.
- Communication: Conveys technical and business risk clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders; produces concise documentation and dashboards to support decision making.
Qualifications
Education/Experience
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or related field.
- 7+ years professional experience in test automation / SDET or software development in test at a senior level.
- Strong proficiency in Java, JavaScript or TypeScript for test frameworks and automation code.
- Hands-on experience integrating automated tests into GitLab CI/CD pipelines.
- Deep understanding of UI, API, integration, and regression testing strategies.
- Experience with automation tools such as Selenium (or Playwright), RestAssured, JUnit/TestNG (or equivalents).
- Proven ability to design and implement automation frameworks, utilities, and CI/CD orchestration.
- Strong debugging skills and experience analyzing logs/telemetry to drive defect resolution.
- Familiarity with Agile methodologies and TDD practices.
- Strong verbal and written communication skills; experience mentoring and performing technical code reviews.
Preferred
- Experience in insurance or financial services domain.
- Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and testing in containerized/cloud environments.
- Experience with performance testing tools (JMeter, Gatling) and interpreting results.
- Exposure to security testing practices and secure handling of test data.
- Experience with contract testing (e.g., Pact) and testing microservices/distributed systems.
- Experience creating test observability, dashboards, and aggregated test reporting.
Essential Job Functions
While performing the duties of this job, the employee is frequently required to stand, walk, sit, use hands to finger, handle, or feel and talk or hear. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, distance vision, color vision, depth perception, and ability to adjust focus.
This job requires the ability to perform duties contained in the job description for this position, including, but not limited to, the above requirements. Reasonable accommodations will be made for otherwise qualified applicants as needed to enable them to fulfill these requirements.
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