Senior SDET - Test Automation & Performance Engineering | Contract | Remote US

About us: Working at Tech Holding isn't just a job, it's an opportunity to be a part of something bigger. We are a full-service consulting firm that was founded on the premise of delivering predictable outcomes and high-quality solutions to our clients. Our founders and team members have industry experience and have held senior positions in a wide variety of companies – from emerging startups to large Fortune 50 firms – and we have taken our combined experiences and developed a unique approach that is supported by the principles of deep expertise, integrity, transparency, and dependability. The Role: We are looking for a Senior SDET / Test Automation Engineer for a project based assignment to build the automated testing and release systems that ensure our products remain reliable as traffic, data volume, integrations, partners, and release velocity increase. This is a hands-on engineering role focused on test automation, API and integration testing, performance and scalability testing, and CI/CD quality gates within an AWS-based environment. This is not a manual QA position. You will design and build reusable test infrastructure, automate critical product and partner workflows, create realistic performance scenarios, and provide engineering teams with clear evidence of whether a release is ready for production. You will work closely with engineering teams and the Performance & Reliability Engineering Lead to ensure quality and scalability are built into the development lifecycle rather than treated as a final release checkpoint. Key Responsibilities: - Design and evolve the automated testing architecture across products and engineering teams - Build and maintain automated API, integration, contract, end-to-end, regression, and UI tests where appropriate - Develop reusable test frameworks, fixtures, synthetic data, mocks, and environment strategies - Build automated testing for distributed services and integrations running within AWS environments - Design and execute load, stress, spike, soak, scalability, degradation, and recovery tests - Translate performance and capacity scenarios into repeatable automated test suites with measurable pass/fail thresholds - Model realistic workloads, concurrency levels, traffic patterns, data volumes, and dependency behavior - Integrate automated suites into CI/CD pipelines and establish enforceable quality and release gates - Create automated release checks tied to quality, latency, reliability, and performance thresholds - Establish practices for identifying, quarantining, diagnosing, and eliminating flaky tests - Improve test observability and failure reporting so engineers can quickly understand and diagnose issues - Build and maintain reliable test data and test environment strategies - Debug failures across APIs, services, databases, infrastructure, and external integrations - Partner with Performance & Reliability Engineering to validate scalability assumptions and production readiness - Partner with Security Engineering on permissions, isolation, negative-path, and abuse-related test scenarios - Track testing trends and help reduce escaped defects, flaky tests, manual release effort, and regression risk - Coach engineers on testability, automation, quality ownership, and defect-prevention practices Required Skills: - Strong experience as an SDET, Software Engineer in Test, Test Automation Engineer, Quality Engineer, or similar engineering-focused testing role - Strong software development and test automation skills - Experience testing APIs, distributed services, integrations, and cloud-based applications - Hands-on experience working within AWS environments - Strong experience building automated API and integration test frameworks - Hands-on performance and scalability testing experience using tools such as k6, Gatling, Locust, JMeter, or equivalent - Experience designing realistic performance workloads rather than simply executing predefined loa