{"id":845018,"url":"https://alion.io/job/sustainment-senior-qa-automation-engineer","title":"Senior QA Automation Engineer","company":{"id":688674,"name":"Sustainment","domain":"sustainment.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/sustainment-2","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"is_intermediary":false,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":null},"role":"QA","role_family":"QA","seniority":"senior","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Austin, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":89000,"max_usd":179000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":290},"experience_years_min":6,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Cypress","optional":false},{"name":"GitLab","optional":false},{"name":"Jira","optional":false},{"name":"Playwright","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":true},{"name":"FedRAMP","optional":true},{"name":"LLM","optional":true},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":true},{"name":"Multi-Agent Systems","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-21T21:15:58Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-21","last_verified_at":"2026-09-24T03:35:00Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":33,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":33},"description":"Company Overview: Sustainment is an AI-native software platform that helps US-based manufacturers easily find and work with the critical suppliers they need to build and manage their supply chains. Our vision is to reimagine American manufacturing as a hyperconnected, secure, and resilient ecosystem of local and regional suppliers who can more easily connect, interact, and do business with the industry and government customers that rely on them. We are a dual-use technology platform that supports both DoD and commercial customers in pursuit of our vision.\nCLEARANCE 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.\nJob Overview: \nSustainment 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.\nThis 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.\nWhat you'll do\nQuality & automation (your core work)\nDrive the shift from mostly-manual testing to a comprehensive, fully automated playwright test suite. This is the north star of the role.\nBuild, 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.\nContribute 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.\nStand up QA quality instrumentation (e.g., escaped-defect tracking) so we can measure the quality of what we ship, not just the speed.\nChampion AI-assisted testing as we scale toward AI-native development.\nTeam leadership (~10-20% of your time)\nMentor two QA engineers and raise the team's automation capability.\nOwn and standardize QA process and standards; test plans, entry/exit criteria, a clear bounce-back vs. hold guideline, and QA's definition of done.\nAct 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.\nQualifications\nSenior-level experience in QA and test automation (6+ years).\nDeep hands-on skill with modern test-automation frameworks (Playwright preferred, Cypress, or similar) and API testing.\nExperience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines (GitLab a plus).\nA track record of building an automated suite up from partial or manual coverage.\nGenuinely comfortable staying hands-on. You want to test and build, not step out of the tools.\nSome experience mentoring engineers or owning QA processes for a small team.\nComfort with Jira for test and defect management.\nNice to have\nExperience with AI-assisted testing tools and workflows.\nDelivery into regulated/federal environments (FedRAMP, CUI, DoD); we ship into government spaces.\nB2B SaaS and/or manufacturing / supply-chain domain experience.\nExposure to data or analytics testing.\nExperience testing agentic / multi-agent systems and prompt-driven workflows.\nAI-assisted test generation - using LLMs or agents to write and maintain tests (exactly where we're taking QA).\nML / data-quality testing - model-output validation, extraction/classification accuracy metrics.\nTesting 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).\nWhat this role is and isn't\nIt 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.\nIt 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.\nTeam & context\nYou'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.\nSustainment offers a competitive benefits package for full time employees including medical, dental, vision, paid time off, company holidays, and 401K matching.\nSustainment is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We provide employment opportunities without regard to age, race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other protected class.\nApplicants must be authorized to work for ANY employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.\nSustainment participates in E-Verify.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5504,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":6,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":true,"languages":[]},"benefits":["401k plan"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Military","Military Logistics","Supply Chain"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-13T00:11:38Z"}],"liveness":{"score":51,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.673,"p_room":0.75,"age_days":32,"expected_fill_days":43,"reasons":["conf:0","win:late"],"computed_at":"2026-09-23T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/sustainment-senior-qa-automation-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/sustainment-senior-qa-automation-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-24T05:03:32Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers"}}