Senior QA Automation Engineer

Love animals? Have you always wanted to apply your technical and creative expertise to a product that protects endangered species on a day-to-day basis? You don't have to decide between a technical career and a deeply moving, important calling. Imagine your cutting-edge software being used by a wildlife ranger in Africa, helping them to combat poaching, study animals, and help local communities.

About EarthRanger: EarthRanger, a critical software solution from Ai2 (Allen Institute for AI), empowers conservationists to make informed operational decisions by integrating data from many sources to create a holistic view of their protected area. The EarthRanger ecosystem also includes Ecoscope, our data analytics and reporting platform, and Gundi, our data integration platform which connects field hardware and third-party systems. Together, our solutions help prevent endangered species poaching, combat deforestation, promote human-wildlife coexistence, and advocate for legal wildlife protection. Used across over 900 conservation sites worldwide – from iconic national parks like the Masai Mara Reserve in Kenya and North Luangwa National Park in Zambia to species-specific programs like the Snow Leopard Trust in Mongolia and Panthera’s Mountain Lion Program in Washington state – EarthRanger is making a global impact.

We are seeking a Senior QA Automation Engineer who thinks like a quality specialist first and an automation engineer second. The ideal candidate is relentlessly curious about how software breaks – someone who hunts for the “unknown unknowns,” the edge cases and failure modes that no one thought to write a ticket for. EarthRanger ingests real-time data from a wide range of sources (animal trackers, radios, vehicles, rangers, patrols, and remote imaging devices) – much of it flowing through Gundi, our third-party data integration platform – and surfaces it to conservationists who make high-stakes decisions in the field, so the reliability of what we ship matters deeply. You will do this as part of the EarthRanger product team, an inclusive, collaborative group working shoulder to shoulder to solve real conservation problems.

As a Senior QA Automation Engineer, you will translate testing intuition into durable, maintainable automation, building confidence that EarthRanger, Ecoscope, and Gundi behave correctly across their web and API surfaces. Your responsibilities will include:

• Hunt for the Unknown Unknowns: Bring a genuine testing mindset – probe the application for edge cases, race conditions, and failure modes that are not in the requirements or on anyone’s radar. Turn exploratory findings into repeatable regression coverage.
• Develop and Execute Comprehensive Test Plans: Create detailed test plans and test cases and review acceptance criteria in collaboration with developers. Take initiative in improving test coverage for new and existing features.
• Build and Maintain Automation: Design, write, and maintain reliable end-to-end and API tests in Playwright and other appropriate harnesses across the web app and its APIs. Keep the suite fast, deterministic, and trustworthy – minimizing flakiness so failures mean something.
• Leverage AI-Assisted Tooling: Make hands-on daily use of modern AI-assisted development tooling (e.g. Claude Code, coding agents, agentic workflows) to accelerate test authoring, expand coverage, and speed up failure triage, with the judgment to review its output critically and help the team adopt these practices well.
• Solve Problems Proactively: Identify potential roadblocks or issues in testing processes and help develop strategies for resolution. Anticipate performance and productivity concerns.
• Respond Rapidly on Quality: Keep a close eye on the quality of the features you touch. Work with support team members to identify product issues, maintaining a high standard of product integrity, and use analytical skills to understand and resolve customer concerns.
• Apply Diverse Testing Experience: Use hands-on experience with various types of testing, including exploratory, regression, smoke, stress, and security testing.
• Refine Testing Strategy: Design and continuously refine testing strategies. Share new testing methods with the team, emphasizing automation and shift-left practices.
• Collaborate on Quality Practices: Work with developers and other QA engineers to develop QA strategies throughout the development process, helping surface and address recurring quality gaps.
• Advocate for Automated Testing: Champion test automation from multiple perspectives, including unit, integration, and end-to-end testing, and contribute to a culture of quality within the team.

• Experience: 5+ years as a quality assurance engineer.
• Education: Bachelor's degree in engineering, computer science, or a related technical discipline.
• Track Record: An established track record of raising the quality bar on complex software to delight customers.
• Testing Mindset: A quality-first instinct for how software breaks, paired with the discipline to turn that instinct into durable automation.
• Delivery and Deadline Orientation: A commitment to delivering quality results, self-organizing to meet schedules without compromising quality.

While not strictly required, candidates with the following skills will be particularly competitive:

• Playwright: Hands-on experience building end-to-end automation with Playwright (or comparable modern frameworks such as Cypress).
• Technical Aptitude: Strong technical aptitude, particularly around client-server web applications and desktop applications, with the ability to converse with developers and program management at a highly technical level.
• Test Infrastructure: Experience implementing test infrastructure and CI-integrated test suites for a web app or SaaS offering.
• API and Performance Testing: Experience testing and automating against REST APIs (e.g. Playwright API testing, Postman, or similar), including stress and performance testing (e.g. Locust, k6, or Gatling).
• Quality Metrics: Experience tracking quality assurance metrics, for instance coverage and regression rates.
• QA Tooling: Use of QA and testing tools (Jira, TestRail, JMeter, SauceLabs, WebdriverIO, or similar).
• Coding for Test: Experience writing code for testing purposes in Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or other languages.
• Modern Front Ends: Experience testing single-page web applications built using React or other modern frameworks.
• Engineering Practices: Knowledge of professional software engineering practices across the full SDLC, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations.
• AI-Assisted QA: Experience applying AI-assisted engineering tools to QA work – e.g. generating or maintaining test cases and automation, and defining sensible guardrails for reviewing AI-generated output.