Staff Test Engineer

📋 Description

• • Own the end-to-end quality story for products that serve millions of users daily. You will design, build, and maintain a resilient automated UI test suite using Playwright that runs continuously across every pull request, staging environment, and production release, ensuring that no critical user journey ever regresses.
• • Partner directly with product, design, and engineering teams to define what “high quality” means for each feature before a single line of code is written. You will translate acceptance criteria into precise, deterministic test cases and embed them into the development workflow so that quality is engineered in—not inspected in—at every step.
• • Act as the go-to expert for test strategy across Automattic. You will review test plans, coach engineers on best practices, and evangelize a culture where every developer owns quality. Through brown-bags, pair-programming, and lightweight documentation, you will raise the collective testing IQ of the entire organization.
• • Triage, reproduce, and prioritize incoming bug reports from Happiness Engineers, customers, and automated alerts. You will build dashboards that surface the highest-impact defects and work with teams to ship fixes within hours—not weeks—so that user trust is continuously reinforced.
• • Continuously evolve our CI/CD tooling to make automated tests faster, more reliable, and easier to debug. You will refactor flaky tests, parallelize suites, and integrate AI-powered failure analysis so that developers get actionable feedback in under five minutes.
• • Experiment with cutting-edge AI/ML techniques to predict, classify, and even auto-heal test failures. You will prototype bots that can triage issues, suggest root causes, and generate new test cases based on real user sessions, turning quality operations into a force multiplier for engineering velocity.
• • Champion accessibility, performance, security, and visual regression testing as first-class citizens. You will extend the test harness to cover WCAG 2.1 AA compliance, Core Web Vitals thresholds, OWASP security checks, and pixel-perfect UI comparisons so that every release is fast, safe, and inclusive.
• • Contribute to open-source projects—especially WordPress, Playwright, and related testing libraries—sharing improvements that benefit the wider community and reinforce Automattic’s leadership in open, transparent software development.
• • Measure what matters. You will define SLIs/SLOs for quality, track defect escape rates, MTTR, and customer-reported issues, then present actionable insights to leadership. Your data-driven narratives will guide roadmap decisions and justify investments in tooling, process, and people.
• • Work fully remote with the autonomy to set your own schedule while staying deeply connected to a globally distributed team. You will collaborate across time zones via Slack, P2 blogs, and Zoom, modeling asynchronous communication that keeps everyone aligned without endless meetings.