Senior Quality Engineer — AI-Driven Testing & Automation

Recruit I.T.; Auckland; On-site; NZD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Recruit I.T. in Auckland is seeking a Senior Quality Engineer to own hands-on test automation for an AI-native SaaS platform.

You'll write and debug tests daily using Playwright (TypeScript or Python), investigate failures, and contribute to release-quality decisions with strong API and data scrutiny. The role emphasizes automated coverage, root-cause analysis of flaky tests, and collaboration with Product, Design, and AI teams to shape testing strategy and improve reliability across complex

Qualifications

• Experience in a hands-on quality engineering, test automation or SDET role, with most of your recent time spent testing rather than leading.
• Strong experience writing maintainable Playwright tests (TypeScript or Python).
• Daily use of AI tools in your testing, and a clear way of checking their output.
• Confident API debugging and SQL skills, ideally with PostgreSQL.
• A proven ability to find the root cause of intermittent test, CI, test data and environment failures, rather than relying on retries.
• Sound release judgement: you can find the edge cases that matter and explain what should block a release.
• A project with real automated tests that you can walk through in detail, whether professional or personal.
• A genuine interest in combining manual verification with building better automated coverage.
• Experience in SaaS product companies, data or analytics platforms, or AI products (advantageous)

Responsibilities

• Maintaining and extending the Playwright integration and end-to-end suite, including visual checks, and proving that key tests catch the faults they target.
• Using coding and testing agents every day, critically reviewing their output, and improving the shared instructions and skills the whole engineering team uses.
• Running focused manual regression and keeping repeatable release plans that cover affected journeys, edge cases and known gaps.
• Exploring complex workflows, lifecycle states, permissions and data, and agreeing expected outcomes early with Product and Design.
• Separating release blockers from minor issues and clearly explaining impact, evidence and uncertainty to the release lead.
• Independently investigating CI, fixture, authentication and environment failures, and escalating with evidence.
• Turning defects and repeated manual checks into maintainable automated coverage.
• Pairing with engineers on improvements, supporting cross-pod releases and working with the AI team on verification.

Skills

Playwright tests

TypeScript

Python

API debugging

SQL

AI tooling

SDET mindset

Tools

Playwright

PostgreSQL

CI/CD tooling

AI testing agents

Job description

Recruit I.T. in Auckland is seeking a Senior Quality Engineer to own hands-on test automation for an AI-native SaaS platform.

You'll write and debug tests daily using Playwright (TypeScript or Python), investigate failures, and contribute to release-quality decisions with strong API and data scrutiny. The role emphasizes automated coverage, root-cause analysis of flaky tests, and collaboration with Product, Design, and AI teams to shape testing strategy and improve reliability across complex