Quality Assurance Engineer

## About the Role Particle41 is seeking a QA Engineer (IC2) to join our engineering team. We're looking for someone who sees quality as more than testing; someone who takes ownership of the overall customer experience and works closely with engineers and product teams to build reliable, high-quality software. In this role, you'll be involved from the early stages of development through production release, helping identify risks, refine acceptance criteria, shape test strategy, and ensure features are thoroughly validated before and after deployment. You'll play an active role in improving team quality practices, raising concerns proactively, and using modern AI-assisted testing approaches to improve efficiency and coverage. If you are passionate about building quality into software from the start -not just validating it at the end; we want to hear from you. ## Responsibilities ### Test Planning and Strategy - Engage with requirements and acceptance criteria before development begins, identifying gaps, ambiguities, and edge cases early. - Contribute to design and refinement discussions to flag testability and quality risks while they are still cheap to fix. - Collaborate with stakeholders to define test objectives, scope, and approach aligned to project milestones. ### Test Automation - Write and maintain automated test suites spanning UI, API, contract, and integration layers using TypeScript and Puppeteer (or equivalent tools). - Contribute to framework improvements and scaling of automation coverage across the feature area. ### AI-Augmented Testing - Use AI tooling consistently for test design, test data generation, edge-case identification, and debugging and critically evaluate AI outputs before incorporating them. - Stay current with evolving AI testing tools and advocate for their adoption where they improve coverage or efficiency. - Adopt AI for test design, data generation, and debugging with guidance and critically evaluate AI outputs before incorporating them where you're building the foundation to progress toward IC3, where AI is used to expand coverage, triage issues, and improve test efficiency across the release. ### Security and Accessibility Testing - Run security testing tools and a11y checks; interpret and report findings, applying OWASP Top 10 and basic manual accessibility validation (keyboard, contrast, screen reader). ### CI/CD Quality Gates and Shift-Right Monitoring - Maintain quality gates in the CI/CD pipeline and ensure automated suites run reliably on every build. - Monitor production alerts and dashboards post-deployment; own post-deploy validation to confirm releases meet quality expectations. ### Defect Identification and Reporting - Document defects with detailed descriptions, reproduction steps, expected vs actual results, and severity classification. - Collaborate with development teams to investigate, troubleshoot, and verify defect resolutions against acceptance criteria. ### Quality Metrics and Reporting - Track, analyse, and report on fea