Software Test Engineer – AI Platform Automation

BigBear.ai; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

BigBear.ai is seeking a Software Test Engineer to strengthen automated validation across our AI platform. The role focuses on scalable regression coverage, backend test automation, and reliable release signaling within a distributed system environment.

You will collaborate with engineers to define acceptance tests, improve test infrastructure, and validate APIs, authentication, and AI workflow paths while minimizing test cost and latency.

Qualifications

• 5-8 years of experience in software testing.
• Strong software engineering background with automated test development.
• Experience testing backend services, APIs, distributed systems, and database-backed applications.
• Experience designing smoke, unit, integration, and end-to-end testing strategies.
• Strong judgment around edge cases, non-happy paths, adversarial inputs, regression risk, and failure isolation.
• Experience improving CI test reliability, execution time, parallelization, test isolation, and failure observability.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain smoke tests, unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests across backend and platform workflows.
• Validate backend changes for new PRs through automated test coverage, direct API testing, and user-facing workflow verification where appropriate.
• Exercise backend behavior through the UI when useful, without owning visual design, frontend UX validation, or manual UI regression testing.
• Build regression coverage for edge cases, malformed inputs, authorization boundaries, concurrency issues, failure modes, and other non-happy-path scenarios.
• Improve the scalability, determinism, execution performance, maintainability, and diagnostic quality of the test suite.
• Strengthen test fixtures, mocks, test data management, failure analysis, and CI feedback loops.
• Design end-to-end tests for AI platform workflows while minimizing unnecessary token usage, external provider calls, latency, and test cost.
• Apply AI-assisted development and analysis tools to accelerate test design, test generation, triage, and maintenance while preserving reliability, reviewability, performance, and deterministic validation standards.
• Validate backend APIs, authentication flows, billing and token behavior, model routing, AI workflow execution, file parsing, MCP/tool execution, and passthrough APIs.
• Validate AI platform E2E paths involving prompts, model responses, streaming behavior, tool calls, agents, workflow orchestration, and provider-facing API compatibility.
• Validate agentic harnesses, MCP integrations, and workflow automation systems, including Power Automate, Zapier, Make, n8n.

Skills

Automated test development

Backend testing

Distributed systems

CI/CD testing

API validation

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL

GitHub Actions

Observability tooling

Job description

BigBear.ai is seeking a Software Test Engineer to strengthen automated validation across our AI platform. The role focuses on scalable regression coverage, backend test automation, and reliable release signaling within a distributed system environment.

You will collaborate with engineers to define acceptance tests, improve test infrastructure, and validate APIs, authentication, and AI workflow paths while minimizing test cost and latency.