Lead Test Automation Developer Jobs in Austin, TX

CLEARANCE REQUIREMENT: Candidates must be eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. Secret or Top Secret security clearance. This is a non-negotiable, hard requirement driven by our Department of War contractor obligations. Candidates who are not eligible will not be considered for this role.

Job Overview: 

Sustainment builds B2B SaaS for manufacturing supply chains, serving both commercial customers and federal/defense programs. As we move to a daily release cadence, we need a senior, hands-on QA automation engineer to lead the charge toward a fully automated playwright test suite while keeping our releases fast and trustworthy.

This is a player-coach role - roughly 80% hands-on, 20% leadership. You'll spend most of your time testing and building automation, with a light leadership layer: mentoring a small QA team and owning our QA process. It is a testing-and-automation role first, and a leadership role second.

Quality & automation (your core work)

• Drive the shift from mostly-manual testing to a comprehensive, fully automated playwright test suite. This is the north star of the role.
• Build, maintain, and scale automated tests (UI and API) and integrate them into our CI/CD pipeline so verification keeps pace with a daily release cadence.
• Contribute to manual and exploratory testing whenever it's needed, especially on releases and wherever automated coverage doesn't exist yet. You're willing to get in the trenches, not just architect from above.
• Stand up QA quality instrumentation (e.g., escaped-defect tracking) so we can measure the quality of what we ship, not just the speed.
• Champion AI-assisted testing as we scale toward AI-native development.

Team leadership (~10-20% of your time)

• Mentor two QA engineers and raise the team's automation capability.
• Own and standardize QA process and standards; test plans, entry/exit criteria, a clear bounce-back vs. hold guideline, and QA's definition of done.
• Act as the QA operational lead and a trusted second to the Director of Engineering, so day-to-day QA runs without needing to route everything through leadership.

• Senior-level experience in QA and test automation (6+ years).
• Deep hands-on skill with modern test-automation frameworks (Playwright preferred, Cypress, or similar) and API testing.
• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines (GitLab a plus).
• A track record of building an automated suite up from partial or manual coverage.
• Genuinely comfortable staying hands-on. You want to test and build, not step out of the tools.
• Some experience mentoring engineers or owning QA processes for a small team.
• Comfort with Jira for test and defect management.

• Experience with AI-assisted testing tools and workflows.
• Delivery into regulated/federal environments (FedRAMP, CUI, DoD); we ship into government spaces.
• B2B SaaS and/or manufacturing / supply-chain domain experience.
• Exposure to data or analytics testing.
• Experience testing agentic / multi-agent systems and prompt-driven workflows.
• AI-assisted test generation - using LLMs or agents to write and maintain tests (exactly where we're taking QA).
• ML / data-quality testing - model-output validation, extraction/classification accuracy metrics.

Testing and evaluating GenAI / LLM-powered features; building evaluation harnesses, ground-truth datasets, and scoring for non-deterministic model outputs (accuracy, precision/recall, LLM-as-judge).

• It is: a senior, hands-on automation engineer who tests daily, builds and owns our automation, and provides lightweight leadership and mentorship for a small team.
• It isn't: a pure people-management seat. You'll set standards and mentor, but daily testing and automation are the heart of the job. If your goal is to move out of hands-on work into full-time management, this isn't the right fit and that's okay.

You'll join a small, high-trust QA team (two engineers today) inside engineering, reporting to the Director of Engineering. We're moving from biweekly to daily releases, we build for both commercial and regulated federal customers, and we're actively adopting AI-assisted development and testing. It's a place to build the QA function into something modern, automated, and measured with real ownership from day one.