Sr. QA Engineer bei Civix

Description

We are seeking a Senior Quality Analyst to play a key role in a highly specialized, mission-critical elections system project. This position is deeply embedded with a single state agency customer, providing end-to-end quality assurance and ensuring delivery excellence on a unique codebase within a highly visible governance context.

What Makes This Role Special

• Embedded in Customer Project: Deliver directly alongside the state election/business services office, with their full context and delivery expectations guiding your day-to-day work.
• High-Impact Delivery: Ensure robustness of systems that support election operations and business operations and ethics oversight—quality is both essential and visible.
• Quality Leadership: As the senior QA voice, shape testing strategy, tooling, metrics, and QA culture in collaboration with both Civix and the state team.

Key Responsibilities

Shift-Left & Early QA Involvement

• Engage in story development and backlog refinement sessions with the customer and dev team to define clear, testable acceptance criteria (ACs) early.
• Use risk-based testing to prioritize test coverage where it matters most.
  
   

Comprehensive Test Strategy

• Design and maintain test plans and cases for manual and automated testing across dev, UAT, and production environments.
• Balance exploratory and usability testing with automation, reflecting agile best practices.
  
   

Test Automation & Framework Evolution

• Define and expand an automation strategy that handles regression, API, performance, and accessibility tests.
• Drive continuous testing as part of CI/CD pipelines—supporting frequent, reliable validation.
  
   

Metrics & Continuous Improvement

• Track and report key quality metrics—defect density, automation coverage, MTTR, leakages, and test execution trends.
• Use these insights to iterate on the QA process, tools, and strategic direction.

Alignment of Requirements and Validation

• Ensure traceability from requirements through to validation (verification & validation alignment).
• Help mitigate miscommunication risks between evolving requirements and QA testing scope.
   

Adaptive Agile Practice

• Participate in sprint planning, refining, and retrospectives to adjust QA approach iteratively.
• Encourage cross-functional collaboration and responsiveness to changing priorities.
  
   

Mentorship & Leadership

• Mentor junior QA staff and help expand QA capabilities within the customer team.
• Act as the QA champion within an embedded agile environment.

Requirements

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field.
• 5+ years of QA experience, including 2+ years in a leadership role.
• Expertise in automated testing frameworks and manual exploratory testing.
• Experience with agile methodologies, CI/CD, and modern QA metrics.
• Strong communicator with ability to work in embedded, customer-facing roles.
• A background in mentoring or leading QA teams is highly preferred.
• Experience in elections is highly preferred.
• Must be able to be onsite in Baton Rouge, LA five days a week. 

Why This Matters

Organizations are increasingly recognizing the importance of agile QA practices—especially shift-left testing, early QA involvement, continuous integration of automated tests, and metrics-driven QA—to ensure high-quality, rapid delivery of software in regulated, mission-critical environments. This role embodies those best practices, uniquely positioned to drive quality in operational infrastructure, backed by real-time customer interaction and delivery accountability.