QA Lead with Cypress and Karate frameworks

Job Description: QA Lead with Cypress and Karate frameworks

Locations:Dallas,tx or st louis,mo or new york,ny(hybrid)

c2c or w2

Job Summary

We are seeking an experienced QA Lead with strong expertise in quality engineering, test automation, API testing, accessibility validation, performance engineering, reliability, observability, and CI/CD-integrated testing.

The ideal candidate will lead the design and implementation of scalable automation frameworks for web portals, APIs, microservices, and cloud-native applications. The role requires hands-on experience with Cypress, TypeScript, BDD/Cucumber, Karate, Postman, Node.js, NVDA, qTest, GitLab, Rancher, Dynatrace, Oracle Database, and AI-assisted engineering tools such as GitHub Copilot.

The candidate will work closely with product owners, developers, architects, DevOps teams, and business stakeholders to establish quality standards, automate regression testing, enforce release quality gates, and improve product quality and delivery efficiency. Experience testing healthcare payer, health-plan, member, provider, or web-chassis applications is preferred.

Key Responsibilities

Quality Engineering and Test Strategy

• Define and implement the overall quality engineering and test automation strategy.
• Develop test approaches covering functional, integration, API, accessibility, regression, performance, security, and production-readiness testing.
• Establish quality standards, test governance, entry and exit criteria, and release-readiness requirements.
• Drive shift-left and shift-right testing throughout the Software Development Life Cycle.
• Review business requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, architecture designs, and API specifications for testability and coverage.
• Identify quality risks, testing dependencies, environment constraints, and data requirements.
• Define and monitor quality metrics, including test coverage, automation coverage, defect leakage, defect density, regression effectiveness, and release quality.

Automation Framework Development

• Design and maintain scalable web automation frameworks using Cypress and TypeScript.
• Implement Behavior-Driven Development using BDD/Cucumber and Gherkin feature files.
• Develop reusable test utilities, page objects, fixtures, custom commands, test-data builders, and reporting capabilities.
• Develop automated API tests using Karate, Postman, REST Assured, or similar tools.
• Automate REST, OpenAPI, GraphQL, SOAP, and microservice integration testing.
• Use Node.js and TypeScript to build automation utilities, mocks, stubs, and test-support services.
• Develop unit, integration, end-to-end, smoke, sanity, and regression automation suites.
• Evaluate and use Selenium, Playwright, Appium, TestNG, and JUnit where applicable.
• Ensure automation frameworks support parallel execution, cross-browser testing, failure analysis, and reusable reporting.
• Maintain automation source code using GitLab repositories and established branching and merge-request practices.

API, Integration and Database Testing

• Validate REST, GraphQL, SOAP, and other enterprise service integrations.
• Use Karate and Postman for functional, negative, security, schema, contract, and regression testing of APIs.
• Validate OpenAPI definitions, request and response payloads, authentication, authorization, error handling, and performance.
• Perform backend and data-validation testing using SQL and Oracle Database.
• Validate data integrity, transformations, stored procedures, transactional behavior, and application-to-database reconciliation.
• Coordinate testing across frontend, Backend-for-Frontend services, Java microservices, databases, and external systems.

Accessibility Testing

• Define accessibility testing approaches aligned with WCAG 2.1/2.2 Level AA and Section 508.
• Perform screen-reader testing using NVDA with supported Windows browsers.
• Validate accessible names, labels, headings, landmarks, reading order, forms, tables, error messages, and dynamic content.
• Conduct keyboard-only testing covering focus order, visible focus, skip links, menus, modals, and focus trapping.
• Validate zoom, reflow, color contrast, semantic HTML, and ARIA implementation.
• Incorporate automated accessibility testing into Cypress and CI/CD pipelines using axe-core or equivalent tools.
• Document accessibility defects with clear WCAG references, reproduction steps, severity, and remediation guidance.
• Collaborate with developers and UX teams to ensure reusable web-chassis components meet accessibility standards.

Test Management and Defect Governance

• Use qTest as the central repository for test cases, test suites, test execution, traceability, and evidence.
• Maintain end-to-end traceability among requirements, user stories, test cases, executions, and defects.
• Use Jira for sprint activities, testing tasks, defect tracking, prioritization, and reporting.
• Lead defect-triage meetings and work with product and engineering teams to determine defect severity and priority.
• Monitor defect aging, reopen rates, leakage, root causes, and closure progress.
• Prepare test status reports, quality dashboards, release recommendations, and executive summaries.
• Maintain reusable regression suites and ensure they remain aligned with application changes.

CI/CD and Continuous Testing

• Integrate automated tests into GitLab CI/CD pipelines.
• Configure smoke, API, accessibility, and regression test execution for merge requests, deployments, and scheduled pipelines.
• Establish automated quality gates based on test results, code quality, test coverage, and defect status.
• Configure pipeline reporting, failure notifications, test-result publishing, and artifact retention.
• Collaborate with DevOps teams to improve pipeline reliability, test-environment stability, and deployment quality.
• Support containerized test execution across Docker and Kubernetes environments.
• Ensure regression pipelines provide fast, reliable, and actionable feedback.

Reliability, Observability and Production Support

• Use Rancher to review Kubernetes workloads, pods, deployments, services, configurations, and container status.
• Use Dynatrace to monitor application health, logs, traces, service dependencies, errors, and performance.
• Analyze frontend, API, microservice, container, and database issues using application telemetry and logs.
• Support production incident analysis, root-cause analysis, and defect reproduction.
• Define operational-readiness criteria and validate monitoring, alerting, logging, and recovery capabilities before release.
• Collaborate with engineering and operations teams to improve application diagnostics and observability.
• Support Service Level Indicator, Service Level Objective, error-budget, capacity-planning, and reliability-testing practices.
• Contribute to resilience, failover, recovery, fault-tolerance, and chaos-testing initiatives.

Performance Engineering

• Define performance, load, stress, endurance, volume, and scalability testing strategies.
• Develop performance tests using JMeter, Gatling, LoadRunner, K6, or similar tools.
• Establish performance baselines, service thresholds, and capacity benchmarks.
• Analyze frontend, API, database, and infrastructure performance.
• Use Dynatrace and other monitoring tools to identify bottlenecks and support performance optimization.
• Work with architects and developers to improve system scalability, resilience, and response time.

AI-Enabled Quality Engineering

• Use GitHub Copilot and other approved AI tools to accelerate automation scripting, test-case generation, test-data creation, debugging, and documentation.
• Apply AI-assisted techniques to identify missing scenarios, edge cases, negative tests, and regression impacts.
• Use AI to support test-code reviews, automation maintenance, defect analysis, log analysis, and root-cause investigation.
• Establish review controls to validate AI-generated test cases and automation code for accuracy, security, privacy, and maintainability.
• Develop reusable prompts, accelerators, and standards for responsible AI use within the QA team.
• Protect confidential information, credentials, source code, PHI, PII, member information, and production data when using AI tools.
• Measure AI-enabled improvements in automation development time, coverage, defect detection, test maintenance, and regression-cycle duration.

Technical and Team Leadership

• Lead and mentor QA engineers, automation engineers, and Software Development Engineers in Test.
• Assign work, monitor progress, remove testing blockers, and manage delivery commitments.
• Conduct test-design, automation-code, and framework-architecture reviews.
• Establish coding standards, reusable patterns, documentation requirements, and peer-review practices.
• Coordinate with product owners, architects, developers, DevOps engineers, business analysts, and delivery managers.
• Communicate testing status, risks, dependencies, defects, and release recommendations to stakeholders.
• Drive continuous improvement and promote a quality-first engineering culture.

Required Technical Skills

Core Test Stack

• Cypress
• TypeScript
• BDD/Cucumber
• Gherkin
• Karate Framework
• Postman
• Node.js
• Visual Studio Code
• GitHub Copilot
• NVDA
• qTest
• GitLab and GitLab CI/CD
• Jira
• Rancher
• Dynatrace
• Oracle Database and SQL

Additional Automation Tools

• Selenium WebDriver
• Playwright
• Appium
• REST Assured
• TestNG
• JUnit
• axe-core or equivalent accessibility automation tools

Programming and Scripting

• TypeScript
• JavaScript
• Node.js
• Java
• Python
• SQL

API and Integration Testing

• REST/OpenAPI
• GraphQL
• SOAP
• Microservices
• API contract and schema validation
• Authentication and authorization testing
• OAuth 2.0, JWT, OpenID Connect, and SSO

DevOps and Infrastructure

• GitLab CI/CD
• GitHub Actions
• Jenkins
• Azure DevOps
• Argo CD
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Helm
• Rancher
• OpenShift

Observability

• Dynatrace
• Prometheus
• Grafana
• ELK Stack
• Splunk
• Datadog
• New Relic

Performance Testing

• JMeter
• Gatling
• LoadRunner
• K6

Reliability Engineering

• SLI and SLO definition
• Error-budget management
• Incident management
• Root-cause analysis
• Capacity planning
• Resilience and failover testing
• Chaos engineering
• Production-readiness validation

Preferred Domain Experience

• Experience testing healthcare payer, health-plan, member, provider, or broker portals.
• Experience testing a common web chassis supporting multiple health plans, brands, markets, or lines of business.
• Understanding of healthcare functions such as eligibility, benefits, claims, Explanation of Benefits, digital ID cards, provider search, prior authorization, and premium payments.
• Familiarity with HIPAA, PHI, PII, consent, privacy, and healthcare security requirements.
• Knowledge of HL7 and FHIR is preferred.
• Experience validating multilingual and localized web experiences.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field.
• Strong experience leading enterprise quality engineering and test automation initiatives.
• Hands-on experience designing and maintaining scalable automation frameworks.
• Demonstrated experience managing QA teams and coordinating with distributed development teams.
• Strong understanding of Agile, Scrum, CI/CD, DevOps, and cloud-native delivery practices.
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, communication, and stakeholder-management skills.
• Ability to provide evidence-based release recommendations and communicate quality risks to technical and business stakeholders.

Primary Skill Set

Cypress, TypeScript, BDD/Cucumber, Karate, Postman, Node.js, GitHub Copilot, NVDA, qTest, GitLab CI/CD, Jira, Rancher, Dynatrace, Oracle Database, API Automation, Accessibility Testing, Performance Engineering, Reliability Engineering, Observability, Healthcare Portals, Web Chassis, and AI-enabled Quality Engineering.