QA Automation Engineer

Turbalance; Heidelberg; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Turbalance is seeking a Senior QA Automation Engineer to drive quality for an AI infrastructure platform. You will design and implement automated tests across scheduler, simulator, APIs, and backend services, while validating Kubernetes-based deployments in CI/CD pipelines.

You will mentor team members, expand test frameworks, and ensure release readiness through comprehensive testing strategies and robust automation practices.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional QA, SDET, or test automation experience.
• Hands-on test automation experience with Java or Python/Pytest.
• Experience across APIs, services, integrations, UI workflows, and end-to-end scenarios.
• Solid understanding of Kubernetes, containers, Linux environments, deployments, configuration, logs, metrics, monitoring, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Ability to test complex infrastructure products with resource allocation and distributed system interactions.
• Experience with manual exploratory testing and defect isolation.
• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI.
• Strong communication with backend, platform, infrastructure, and product teams.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain automated tests across scheduler, simulator, APIs, backend services, frontend workflows, integrations, and system-level scenarios.
• Develop regression, smoke, integration, end-to-end, and release test suites that run in CI/CD pipelines.
• Test AI infrastructure workflows for GPU datacenters and heterogeneous resource allocation.
• Perform manual exploratory, functional, and regression testing where automation is not yet available.
• Collaborate with engineers and product teams to define test strategy and release readiness.
• Analyze test results, diagnose failures, and drive root-cause resolution.
• Improve CI/CD quality gates, test reporting, flaky-test handling, and environment validation.
• Contribute to test framework architecture and maintainable automation practices.
• Document test plans and release recommendations for stakeholders.
• Mentor engineers and QA colleagues on automation best practices.

Skills

Test automation

Java

Python/Pytest

CI/CD

Debugging

Communication

Leadership

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

Helm

GitHub Actions

GitLab CI

Jenkins

Job description

Your mission

Your profile

Senior QA Automation Engineer

We are looking for a Senior QA Automation Engineer to drive quality for our AI infrastructure platform. We build scheduler and simulator products that work directly with customer datacenter infrastructure for GPUs, helping customers operate and simulate usage across mostly heterogeneous environments.

This role requires strong test automation, practical manual testing judgment, Kubernetes and infrastructure understanding, and CI/CD experience. You will help define how we test scheduler and simulator behavior, what we automate, and how quality gates become part of everyday development and release workflows.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain automated tests across scheduler, simulator, APIs, backend services, frontend workflows, integrations, and system-level scenarios.

• Develop reliable regression, smoke, integration, end-to-end, and release test suites that run in CI/CD pipelines and validate Kubernetes-based deployments.

• Test AI infrastructure workflows for GPU datacenters, heterogeneous resource allocation, configuration changes, failure scenarios, monitoring signals, and rollback behavior.

• Perform manual exploratory, functional, and regression testing where automation is not yet available or where senior judgment is required for complex infrastructure behavior.

• Collaborate with engineers, product managers, and platform teams to define test strategy, quality criteria, release readiness, reproducible simulation scenarios, and customer-environment risk areas.

• Analyze test results, investigate failures, distinguish product defects from environment, infrastructure, data, or test issues, and drive root-cause resolution.

• Improve CI/CD quality gates, test reporting, flaky-test handling, test data management, environment validation, and automated checks for Kubernetes deployments.

• Contribute to test framework architecture, tooling choices, Python coding standards, and maintainable automation practices.

• Document test plans, risks, coverage gaps, simulation assumptions, infrastructure constraints, and release recommendations clearly for technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Mentor engineers and QA colleagues on automation best practices, testability, infrastructure-aware QA, and quality ownership.

What we're looking for

• 5+ years of professional QA, SDET, or test automation experience, ideally in infrastructure, platform, cloud, developer tooling, distributed systems, or deep-tech product environments.

• Strong hands-on test automation experience, especially with Java OR Python/Pytest; ability to write clean, maintainable test code and tooling.

• Experience building automated tests across APIs, services, integrations, UI workflows, and end-to-end or system-level scenarios.

• Solid understanding of Kubernetes, containers, Linux environments, deployments, configuration, logs, metrics, monitoring, and CI/CD pipelines.

• Ability to test complex infrastructure products where behavior depends on resource allocation, workload characteristics, environment configuration, and distributed system interactions.

• Experience with manual exploratory testing, defect isolation, risk-based release decisions, and investigating ambiguous failures in technical systems.

• Practical experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI, or similar.

• Experience debugging failures using logs, metrics, traces, screenshots, test artifacts, Kubernetes events, container logs, and developer tools.

• Strong communication skills and the ability to work closely with backend, platform, infrastructure, and product teams to improve testability and prevent defects early.

• Senior-level ownership: able to define priorities, challenge assumptions, improve processes, and deliver without detailed supervision.

Nice to have

• Experience testing AI infrastructure, GPU platforms, schedulers, simulators, cloud platforms, infrastructure products, developer tools, data platforms, or complex distributed systems.

• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, observability tooling, Linux, networking basics, or platform engineering workflows.

• Experience testing heterogeneous environments with different GPU types, node configurations, workloads, tenants, quotas, or capacity constraints.

• Experience with performance, load, scalability, reliability, contract, security, or chaos testing.

• Experience building test frameworks, internal QA tooling, synthetic workload generators, simulators, or test data pipelines from scratch.

• Experience with test management, reporting, quality analytics, and release dashboards.

• Experience coaching teams toward better quality ownership, shift-left testing, and infrastructure-aware QA practices.

What this role is not

This is not a purely manual QA execution role and not a role focused only on clicking through predefined test cases.

We are looking for a senior profile who can design automation strategy, understand technical systems, and actively improve the quality of our delivery process.

Manual testing is still important, but it should complement strong automation, technical investigation, and CI/CD-driven quality practices.

Why us?