Senior Software QA Engineer: API, ML & Cloud Testing

Proto Labs; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 107,000 - 161,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

401k with company match

Employee Stock Purchase Program

PTO and Holidays

Wellness Hours

Job summary

Protolabs is seeking a Senior Software Quality Engineer to lead test strategy and automation across pricing, ML outputs, and API integrations in a fixed hybrid on-site role at HQ. You will design and maintain automated test suites, drive CI/CD quality gates, and collaborate with engineers to improve testability and prevent defects through shifts-left practices.

The ideal candidate has 7+ years in SaaS quality assurance, strong Python automation skills, API/UI testing expertise, and experience

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in software quality assurance, test automation, or SDET roles in a SaaS or production environment.
• Experience owning test automation and CI integration for backend or platform teams.
• Strong programming skills for test automation, especially in Python, with C# as a plus, and comfortable working directly in engineering codebases including reviews, fixes, shared libraries, and build pipelines.
• Solid experience with API and UI testing, along with component integration and service level integration testing.
• ISTQB certification at foundation or advanced level, or equivalent formal QA training, with practical application of structured test design techniques such as equivalence partitioning, boundary value analysis, risk based testing, traceability, and quality modelling.
• Strong analytical skills when working in ambiguous domains, with the ability to translate finance, sales, and business rules into clear test cases and automation.
• A strong quality mindset with attention to detail, especially around pricing rules and regression in revenue impacting flows.

Responsibilities

• Support and evolve the test strategy for the Pricing domain, covering functional, integration, contract, regression, and non‑functional testing such as performance, reliability, and ML quality gating across services and APIs
• Design, implement, and maintain automated test suites for APIs, events, integrations, and targeted end‑to‑end and performance scenarios aligned with the team’s architecture, including API and event‑driven components and cloud deployments
• Own and extend continuous testing within GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines, ensuring test execution on PRs, enforcing quality gates, reporting results, managing flaky tests, and integrating with deployment workflows.
• Validate pricing and ML outputs for correctness, edge cases, and regression, including geometry‑driven estimates, probabilistic forecasts, and model‑serving behaviour where applicable
• Partner with engineers to improve testability through clear acceptance criteria, observable systems, contract testing between services, and shift‑left practices during code reviews.
• Investigate defects in production and pre‑production environments, perform root cause analysis, and drive preventative improvements such as closing automation gaps, increasing coverage, and enhancing processes
• Contribute to release readiness by assessing risks, defining regression scope, providing go or no‑go input, and verifying system behaviour after release for pricing‑critical changes
• Monitor quality metrics including coverage trends, defect escape rates, pipeline stability, and SLA‑related signals, and communicate status clearly to engineering and product leadership while automating post‑release monitoring
• Mentor QA engineers and SDETs, promote testing standards, establish coding conventions for tests, and drive shared ownership of quality and testing frameworks across the engineering organisation.
• Participate in on‑call or incident support rotations when needed, focusing on reproductions, adding automated regression coverage, and ensuring long‑term fixes
• Ensure the test approach aligns with relevant regulatory, audit, and data handling requirements, especially in the context of commercial pricing systems

Skills

Python programming

Test automation

CI integration

SDET mindset

Analytical skills

Regression testing

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes basics

pytest

Playwright

Postman

Locust

SQL queries

GitHub Actions

Job description

Protolabs is seeking a Senior Software Quality Engineer to lead test strategy and automation across pricing, ML outputs, and API integrations in a fixed hybrid on-site role at HQ. You will design and maintain automated test suites, drive CI/CD quality gates, and collaborate with engineers to improve testability and prevent defects through shifts-left practices.

The ideal candidate has 7+ years in SaaS quality assurance, strong Python automation skills, API/UI testing expertise, and experience