Senior QA Engineer

Responsibilities

• Provide hands-on QA support for our highest-impact work. 
  When we're running a fundraiser, A/B testing the donations form, or shipping critical campaign infrastructure, you'll be the person ensuring it works as intended before it reaches members.
• Establish testing standards and a shared vocabulary for quality. 
  Document QA practices, define what "ready to ship" looks like, and help the team adopt them.
• Coach and educate engineers on testing. 
  Help engineers write better tests, think about edge cases earlier, and own quality alongside you rather than handing it off.
• Design and grow our automated test coverage. 
  Identify the highest-leverage candidates for automation, design the architecture, and progressively expand coverage where it delivers the most value.
• Define meaningful quality metrics. 
  Help us establish baselines (test coverage, defect escape rate, time-to-detect) and use them to drive improvements.
• Partner on incident response and post-mortems. 
  When something breaks, help us learn from it and prevent the same class of issue from recurring.
• Be a thought partner to engineering leads and PMs. 
  Weigh in on test strategy during project kickoffs, not just at the end.
• Design and roll out our automated testing strategy. 
  Identify where automation delivers the most value across our Python services and CMS, choose the right framework for our stack, and build coverage incrementally; starting with the flows where regressions hurt most.
• Own QA across the sprint cycle. 
  Review tickets before work begins to ensure acceptance criteria are clear and testable, flag scope changes as they emerge mid-sprint, and partner with PMs and engineering leads on what "done" actually means.
• Build feedback loops that close after we ship. 
  Track defects, regressions, and user-reported issues so we learn from what reaches production, and feed those learnings back into how we test, plan, and prioritize.

Qualifications

• Experience as a Senior QA engineer, with a strong mix of manual and automated testing
• Demonstrated ability to design test strategies for complex web applications
• Hands-on experience with Playwright or similar modern test automation frameworks
• Comfort working with Python-based backend services and containerized environments (Docker)
• Experience testing mission-critical systems; ideally including payment flows, transactional email, or high-traffic public-facing web
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; can explain testing concepts to engineers, PMs, and non-technical campaigners
• A coaching mindset: you enjoy levelling up the people around you and don't see yourself as the only path to quality
  
  

• Experience in non-profit, activism, journalism, or other mission-driven organizations
• Familiarity with our stack: Python, Docker, AWS (ECS), MySQL
• Background in performance or load testing
• Comfort with localized / multilingual product testing

• First 90 days: You've built relationships across the team, identified the highest-impact QA gaps, and are providing direct testing support for our most critical workflows. The team knows what to bring you and when.
• First 6 months: Testing standards are documented and being adopted. Automated regression coverage is in place for our highest-stakes flows (donations, fundraising, key campaign templates). The team has a shared vocabulary for talking about quality.
• First year: Production is no longer our quality gate. We have meaningful quality metrics, growing automation coverage, and engineers who confidently ship because they know how to test their own work, with you as a force multiplier, not a bottleneck.