Contractor: Senior Quality Engineer

The role:  Newsela is on a mission to deliver "meaningful classroom learning for every student." As a Senior 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. 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: Deliver high-quality test coverage on time, leveraging AI tools to accelerate automation development without sacrificing reliability or craft. Build and maintain automated test frameworks and regression suites across UI, API, and service layers, incorporating AI-assisted development practices as part of a standard workflow. Own test planning and execution end-to-end within your scrum team — from story validation through production release support — with minimal oversight. Test and validate internally-built LLMs and external AI tools and services, applying sound quality engineering judgment to non-deterministic systems. Partner closely with Engineering, Product Management, and Product Design to identify quality risks early and refine ambiguous requirements into clearly defined, testable acceptance criteria. Serve as the quality advocate within your scrum team, providing technical guidance that elevates the team's approach to testing throughout all phases of development. Own test status communication to all stakeholders — surfacing coverage gaps, release risk, and defect trends with clarity and appropriate urgency. Establish and follow best practices for defect documentation, triage, and tracking — and use AI tooling to assist with issue detection, reproduction, and resolution. Mentor and grow mid-level quality engineers through code reviews, pairing sessions, and hands-on guidance. 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. All offers of employment are contingent upon the successful completion of a background check as part of our pre-employment process. About Newsela: Newsela is a leading education technology company dedicated to meaningful classroom learning for every student. We deliver integrated, AI-powered solutions designed to unlock student engagement, empower teachers, and drive meaningful learning outcomes. Our suite of products supports knowledge and skill development, writing practice, daily instruction, assessment, and data-informed decision-making across K–12 classrooms. Grounded in learning science research, Newsela’s solutions integrate content, assessment, and analytics to help educators track progress, understand student outcomes, and deliver high-impact instruction that supports every learner. #LI-Remote

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