Senior QA Automation Engineer

Overview
We are seeking a detail-oriented and proactive QA Automation Engineer to join our team. This role is responsible for ensuring the quality, reliability, and performance of our applications through a combination of manual and automated testing across front-end and back-end systems.
The ideal candidate is passionate about software quality, enjoys working in a collaborative environment, and is motivated to improve testing processes, tools, and automation coverage. About Nucleus Security
Nucleus Security is transforming how security and development teams manage vulnerabilities at a scale. Our platform unifies vulnerability data across scanners and environments, enabling organizations to prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities efficiently. Through our integrations, we empower customers to ingest data from their existing tools with minimal setup and maximum reliability. Core Responsibilities
What You Will Do

- Ensure the quality and reliability of assigned products across the full stack — UI, APIs, and data — defining test approach and risk coverage with the QA Manager, and leveraging AI tools to improve coverage and efficiency

- Build, extend, and improve scalable automation frameworks in Selenium and Playwright that the team relies on, reducing manual testing effort and increasing confidence in every release

- Act as a quality advocate within the team — reviewing test code, sharing testing practices with peers, and raising design concerns early enough to prevent defects rather than catch them

Testing & Quality Assurance

- Plan and execute test coverage for complex, cross-system features, including functional, regression, smoke, integration, and end-to-end testing

- Design and execute manual and automated test cases covering functionality, performance, and reliability, including positive, negative, and edge cases

- Assess risk and prioritize testing effort, making clear recommendations on depth of coverage versus delivery timelines

- Map test cases to business requirements and functional designs, ensuring traceability and identifying gaps before development begins

- Investigate complex or intermittent failures to root cause, distinguishing product defects from test instability and environment issues

- Document and report defects, verify fixes, and ensure timely resolution in collaboration with development teams

Database & Data Validation

- Write and execute complex SQL queries to validate data integrity, transformations, and business logic across the application stack

- Verify data accuracy through ingestion, normalization, and processing workflows — record counts, deduplication, field-level mapping, and malformed or partial data

- Validate database interactions triggered by UI and API operations, and test data migrations, schema changes, and backfills for correctness and backward compatibility

- Build and maintain reusable test data sets and database setup and teardown routines for reliable, repeatable automated runs

Automation & Frameworks

- Implement and review automated test scripts using Java with Selenium WebDriver and Playwright, following best practices such as the Page Object Model

- Contribute to the architecture and long-term health of automation frameworks — structure, reusable components, reporting, and test data management

- Incorporate database validation into automated suites through query-based assertions and programmatic test data setup

- Improve automation reliability by reducing flakiness, execution time, and maintenance cost as suites grow

- Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines and support optimization within DevOps workflows, including parallel execution

- Support performance and scale testing, and recommend tools and processes that measurably improve QA effectiveness

AI-Assisted Testing

- Hands-on experience using AI tools for test case generation, test data creation, and defect analysis

- Familiarity with Model Context Protocol (MCP) tooling, such as