Lead Software Engineer in Test

Lead Software Engineer in Test

CD Baby — Platform Team
About Us

CD Baby is a globally recognized leader in the music industry and the first platform to offer artists direct distribution to their fans. Our technology organization has a deep history and a strong foundation, built by long-tenured, dedicated professionals. As we navigate the next era of music technology, we are committed to modernizing our core systems, fostering an agile culture, and leveraging cutting-edge platforms to better serve our artists, partners, and fans worldwide.
The Role

We are seeking a Lead Software Engineer in Test to be the senior-most quality voice on CD Baby ’s flagship customer-facing software: the members application our artists use to distribute their music, get paid, and understand their audiences, and the .com marketing site that brings new artists into the platform. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role with broad technical authority over how we test — the engineer who treats quality as a software engineering discipline and builds the practice to prove it.

In the near term, you will help carry our customer-facing platform across the finish line for a brand relaunch worthy of CD Baby — standing up the automated coverage, the test data, and the CI/CD gates that let us ship with confidence. Beyond launch, your defining mandate is to architect our testing practice from the ground up: choose the frameworks, build the suites, integrate them into our delivery pipeline, and make automated, AI-augmented testing a first-class capability of the team as our customer-facing stack evolves from a .NET monolith into a modular, API-driven, service-based architecture.

This is a role for an engineer who is energized by both the discipline of writing the code that proves our software works every day, and the craft of designing a testing program that scales with the platform underneath it.
What You’ll Own
Testing Strategy & Practice

- Define and drive the multi-year evolution of CD Baby ’s automated testing practice — from a nascent Playwright-based program today to a comprehensive, AI-augmented testing capability that scales as our architecture moves from monolith to services.

- Choose the right tools for each layer of the test pyramid: UI/end-to-end (currently Playwright), API and contract testing, integration testing across our third-party API seams (FUGA, Zendesk, Trolley, and others integral to our operations), and performance and load testing. Bring a clear point of view on what to use, why, and how it fits together.

- Design and own the CI/CD test integration. Our pipeline runs on ArgoCD; you will define how tests gate every release, what runs where, how fast feedback loops are kept fast, and how the suite earns trust over time.

- Establish test data strategy, environment management, and the engineering patterns that keep tests reliable as the surface area grows.

Building the Test Suite

- Own the test suite for the entire flagship application. The primary job here is writing the code — the tests, the fixtures, the helpers, the harnesses — that proves the member application and the .com marketing site work as our customers expect, release after release.

- Cover the .NET monolith we operate today, the Next.js front end, and the new services as they emerge. Build coverage that travels with the architecture rather than fighting it.

- Treat usability and stability as first-class quality concerns alongside functional correctness. Our interfaces must be intuitive, accessible, and dependable; your tests should help us prove all three.

- Use AI aggressively as a force multiplier. Drive AI-assisted test authoring, suite generation, and maintenance so that one senior engineer can credibly cover the full surface area of a complex product. We expect the toolchain you build to look meaningfully different from a traditional QA program because of how you apply AI.

Cross-Functional Team Craft

- Embed on a cross-functional Platfor