Staff QA Engineer, APIs Location: Nashville, TN (Hybrid, 3 days in office) Compensation: $150,000 - $180,000 base salary Eligibility: U.S. residents only About the Role We're looking for a Staff QA Engineer with deep, specialized expertise in API quality to own and elevate the reliability of our Core services. This role sits at the heart of our Core Engineering team, ensuring that the services powering our platform are reliable, secure, and performant at scale. You'll design and implement test automation strategies, build robust CI/CD quality gates, and drive a culture of quality across engineering. AI tooling is embedded in how we work, and you'll be expected to leverage it daily to accelerate test development, debugging, and analysis. This is a technical leadership role that requires deep expertise in API testing, strong security instincts, and the ability to mentor engineers on quality best practices. What You'll Do - Own API quality strategy. Define and execute the testing approach for our Python-based backend services, event-driven workflows, and integration points. - Build test automation at scale. Design and maintain automated test suites that run reliably in CI/CD pipelines, using AI-assisted tooling to accelerate test creation and maintenance. - Drive security and compliance testing. Validate authentication flows, PII handling, data masking, and privacy compliance requirements across our platform. - Performance and load testing. Stress test APIs that power high-volume automation and scraping workflows; identify bottlenecks and ensure systems scale. - Strengthen CI/CD quality gates. Integrate automated testing into deployment pipelines; define and enforce quality standards for releases. - Mentor and elevate the team. Coach engineers on testing best practices, including effective use of AI tools to improve productivity and code quality. - Collaborate cross-functionally. Partner with Automation, Integrations, SOC, and Platform teams to ensure end-to-end quality across Core services. Basic Qualifications - 8+ years of experience in software quality engineering, with career focus and hands-on ownership in API and backend test strategy. - Expert-level Python in a production environment, including building and maintaining test automation frameworks at scale. - Deep experience testing RESTful APIs, including authentication flows, error handling, rate limiting, and versioning. - Hands-on experience with microservices and event-driven architectures in distributed systems. - Track record of integrating automated test suites into CI/CD pipelines, with measurable impact on release quality. - Experience designing and executing security-focused testing for systems handling PII or sensitive data. - Strong mentoring skills with demonstrated success raising quality practices across an engineering team. - Production experience with AWS services (Lambda, API Gateway, SQS, or similar). - Proficiency using AI tooling to augment testing workflows and maintain engineering velocity. This role requires advanced proficiency in English to effectively communicate complex information with team members and stakeholders, and to complete job-related documentation and collaboration tasks. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and are committed to providing reasonable accommodations where applicable. Preferred Qualifications - Hands-on experience with performance testing tools like Locust or k6 in production load scenarios. - Familiarity with Prefect, Airflow, or Temporal for orchestrating test workflows or validating pipeline reliability. - Experience deploying and testing services in Kubernetes or containerized environments. - Background testing scraper-based systems, data pipelines, or high-throughput ingestion workflows. - Exposure to contract testing or API schema validation (OpenAPI, Pact, or similar). Compensation This role has a target base salary range of $160,000 - $180,000. Final compensation is based on demonstrated experience, interview performance, and scope of impact. #LI-MH1 #hybrid #engineering #nashville