Alpinist Studios is a global team delivering high-quality solutions to clients across various sectors, including Healthcare, Education, Non-profits, and Retail. Our expertise ensures impactful digital engineering solutions worldwide. We are your Digital Engineering Partner, committed to excellence and innovation.

Core Responsibilities

Test Strategy & Coverage

• Audit inherited codebases to map what already has test coverage, what does not, and what is highest-risk to change blind
• Prioritize regression coverage around the paths that would hurt most if they broke silently, rather than chasing coverage percentage
• Choose and evolve the right test pyramid (unit, integration, end-to-end) for each product instead of defaulting to one tool everywhere

Automation

• Build and maintain automated regression suites (e.g. Playwright, Cypress, Vitest, Jest) across front-end and API layers
• Write tests that fail for the right reasons: real behavior, not implementation detail
• Maintain test data and environment setup so suites stay reliable and are not treated as noise to silenc

CI/CD & Release Readiness

• Wire quality gates into CI/CD (GitHub Actions) so failing tests block merge and block release
• Define and own release readiness checklists and go/no-go criteria
• Track and report quality metrics (coverage, flake rate, escaped defects) so the team has real signal instead of a feeling

Cross-Team Partnership

• Work directly with engineers shipping against specs (an OpenSpec proposal to spec to code loop) so test coverage ships with the code, not after it
• Coach engineers on writing their own tests where that is the more efficient path, rather than being the sole tester on every PR

Required Skills & Experience

MUST-HAVES

• 5+ years in QA automation or SDET roles, including real experience taking over an existing, undertested codebase, not just writing tests for greenfield work
• Strong hands-on experience with modern automated testing frameworks (e.g. Playwright, Cypress, Vitest, Jest) across UI and API layers
• Comfortable reading and reasoning about TypeScript/JavaScript application code, not limited to black-box testing
• Experience wiring test suites into CI/CD (GitHub Actions or equivalent) as real merge and release gates
• A track record of building regression safety nets under time pressure, prioritizing by risk rather than trying to cover everything at once
• Clear written communication: risk assessments and go/no-go calls that non-technical stakeholders can act on

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience testing AI-assisted or AI-generated code specifically, where review discipline matters more, not less
• Performance or load testing experience
• Familiarity with Next.js/React application architecture
• Experience defining a testing strategy for a company mid-transition: an acquisition, a rewrite, or a team handoff