Contractor: Senior Quality Engineer

Newsela is on a mission to deliver meaningful classroom learning for every student. As a Senior Full-Stack Quality Engineer, you will be a critical force in ensuring that mission is delivered through reliable, high-quality software. You will work alongside talented product engineers to test complex front-end applications powered by cloud-based back-end services, internal LLMs, and third-party AI tools. This is a hands-on, full-stack QE role — not just automation, not just manual. You will own quality end-to-end, moving from story acceptance criteria all the way to production health monitoring.

Responsibilities

Build, maintain, and execute automated test frameworks and regression suites across UI, API, and service layers using modern AI-assisted practices; Test and validate internally built LLMs and external AI tools and services, applying rigorous quality engineering standards to non-deterministic systems; Own test planning, execution, and release support from story validation to production deployment with minimal oversight; Partner with Engineering, Product Management, and Product Design early in the lifecycle to refine ambiguous requirements into clear, testable acceptance criteria; Serve as the team's quality advocate, providing technical guidance, conducting code reviews, and pairing with mid-level quality engineers; Establish best practices for defect tracking, triage, and communication while using AI tooling for issue detection, reproduction, and resolution

Requirements

5+ years of professional software testing and QA experience in an Agile Scrum environment; 5+ years building test frameworks with TypeScript, JavaScript, or Python, including WebdriverIO or Playwright; Demonstrated capability across manual, exploratory, regression, integration, API/services, and database testing; Solid understanding of Git branching strategies, PR workflows, and incremental CI/CD deployment pipelines; Hands-on experience using AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) as part of daily workflow; Ability to engage actively in all scrum ceremonies, surface release risks and defect trends to stakeholders, and handle production escalation support; Experience in EdTech, SaaS/B2B software, or e-learning/online education platforms; Experience with Playwright, WebdriverIO, or Selenium; Jest, Vitest, or Mocha; k6, JMeter, or Locust; GitHub Actions and AWS; Datadog, Sentry, or New Relic; TestRail, Jira, Xray, or Zephyr

Nice to have

Experience testing AI-driven features, LLM outputs, or ML-backed services; Familiarity with performance and accessibility testing; Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP) and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, CircleCI); Prior background in EdTech or consumer-facing SaaS products