Senior Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) — Cloud-Native SaaS Platform

## About the company Direct is the short-term rental property management system (PMS) built for what comes next. Our platform unifies listing distribution, reservations, communication, accounting, payments, automation, operational workflows, and intelligence into a single modern infrastructure layer purpose-built for professional hospitality operators. For years, the vacation and short-term rental industry has relied on fragmented systems stitched together across PMS platforms, accounting software, channel managers, and third-party tools. We're taking a different approach — rebuilding the foundation around unified operations, financial integrity, scalable cloud-native architecture, and the next generation of automation and AI capabilities. We're a fully remote, engineering-driven team focused on solving complex operational and financial challenges at scale. If you enjoy building foundational systems and helping shape the future of hospitality technology, we'd love to hear from you. ## About the role - This is a build-it role, not a maintain-it role. We're a growing SaaS platform built on a modern cloud-native, event-driven architecture with a large microservices backend and a TypeScript web frontend. We're hiring our test engineering lead to design and implement our testing architecture from the ground up — owning strategy, building the foundational tooling, establishing standards, and bringing the rest of the team along by example. - This is a remote role. We're open to candidates across multiple geographies, where practical (Americas/Europe overlap preferred). Given the role's seniority and architectural nature, strong communication and meaningful time zone overlap are important. ## What you'll do - Define the test strategy across unit, integration, contract, end-to-end, and load testing for a serverless microservices environment. - Build the shared test infrastructure: reusable fixtures, cloud service mocking, database fixtures, event/message harnesses, and isolated invocation harnesses for serverless functions. - Establish coverage standards and bring under-tested services up to baseline, starting with high-risk financial and transactional domains. - Design contract and integration tests for partner integrations, including payment processors and third-party APIs (OAuth2 and webhook-based). - Expand cross-browser end-to-end coverage on the web frontend. - Wire tests into CI/CD pipelines with sensible gating, parallelization, flake detection, and reporting. - Build load and resilience tests covering cold starts, API throughput, event fan-out, and downstream rate limits. - Mentor engineers on writing testable code and authoring tests as part of their normal workflow. ## Required experience - 5+ years in test engineering roles with significant hands-on coding. - Proven experience testing AWS serverless applications: multi-service projects deployed via infrastructure-as-code, and mocking/integration-testing managed AWS services (compute, API gateways, event buses, NoSQL, object storage, queues, secrets, identity). Familiarity with local AWS emulation tooling (e.g. moto, LocalStack). - Strong Python, including pytest and testing asynchronous code. - Experience testing services backed by relational databases with realistic fixtures and transactional isolation. - Experience with a modern cross-browser end-to-end framework (Playwright or Cypress) against a React-based web application. - Experience designing contract tests against third-party APIs. - Comfortable with wiring tests into CI/CD pipelines and establishing meaningful gating. - Ability to define standards and architecture for a team without a uniform testing practice today. ## Highly desirable - Testing event-driven architectures: async retries, dead-letter handling, idempotency, eventual consistency. - Integration-testing payment processors and/or OAuth2 partner integrations. - Load and performance testing of serverless workloads (Artillery, k6, Locust), including cold-start analysis. - TypeScript proficiency and frontend unit/component testing experience. - Security testing fundamentals and audit-friendly QA documentation (SOC 2 or similar).