Contractor: Senior Quality Engineer

The role:  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. Why you’ll love this role - Drive High Impact: Own quality end-to-end within your scrum team and directly support a mission that transforms classroom learning for millions of students. - Modern AI Workflows: Leverage cutting-edge AI tools (like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot) to accelerate test development while testing complex, non-deterministic AI features and LLMs. - Technical Ownership: Build and architect full-stack test frameworks across UI, API, and service layers with autonomy and high visibility. - Collaborative Leadership: Partner closely with cross-functional peers in Product, Design, and Engineering while mentoring mid-level engineers to elevate the overall quality culture. What You'll Be Doing: - End-to-End Automation & Frameworks: Build, maintain, and execute automated test frameworks and regression suites across UI, API, and service layers using modern AI-assisted practices. - AI & LLM Validation: Test and validate internally built LLMs and external AI tools and services, ing rigorous quality engineering standards to non-deterministic systems. - Scrum & Delivery Ownership: Own test planning, execution, and release support from story validation to production deployment with minimal oversight. - Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Engineering, Product Management, and Product Design early in the lifecycle to refine ambiguous requirements into clear, testable acceptance criteria. - Quality Advocacy & Mentorship: Serve as the team's quality advocate, providing technical guidance, conducting code reviews, and pairing with mid-level quality engineers. - Defect Management & Observability: Establish best practices for defect tracking, triage, and communication while using AI tooling for issue detection, reproduction, and resolution. About You: - 5+ Years Experience: Professional software testing and QA experience within an Agile Scrum environment. - Automation Expertise: 5+ years building test frameworks with TypeScript, JavaScript, or Python, including hands-on experience with WebdriverIO or Playwright. - Full-Spectrum Testing: Demonstrated capability across manual, exploratory, regression, integration, API/services, and database testing. - CI/CD & DevOps: Solid understanding of Git branching strategies, PR workflows, and incremental CI/CD deployment pipelines. - AI Tooling Integration: Hands-on experience using AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) as part of your daily workflow, paired with strong critical thinking and quality ownership. - Proactive Communication: Ability to engage actively in all scrum ceremonies, surface release risks and defect trends to stakeholders, and handle production escalation support. Required Industry & Technical Background - Industry Experience: EdTech, SaaS/B2B software, or e-learning/online education platforms. - Automation & Test Runners: Playwright, WebdriverIO, or Selenium (E2E browser automation); Jest, Vitest, or Mocha (unit/integration runners). - Performance & Infrastructure: Experience with k6, JMeter, or Locust; test execution via GitHub Actions and AWS. - Observability & Management: Experience with logs/error tracking in Datadog, Sentry, or New Relic; test management using TestRail, Jira, Xray, or Zephyr. Preferred Qualifications - Experience testing AI-driven features, LLM outputs, or ML-backed services. - Fa