Staff Software Test Engineer

Staff Software Test Engineer

Location: Austin, TX, United States

Category: Technology

Job ID: 3351

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Description

Staff SDET — Consumer Quality Enablement

Recognized as the No. 1 site trusted by real estate professionals, Realtor.com® has been at the forefront of online real estate for over 25 years, connecting buyers, sellers, and renters with trusted insights and expert guidance to find their perfect home. Through its robust suite of tools, Realtor.com® not only makes a significant impact on the real estate industry at large, but for consumers, navigating the biggest purchase they will make in their life, by providing a user experience that is easy to use, easy to understand, and most of all, easy to make decisions.

Join us on our mission to empower more people to find their way home by breaking barriers to entry, making the right connections, and building confidence through expert guidance.

About the Role

We have an exciting opportunity for an innovative Staff Engineer in Test to join our RDC team. The charter for this team is to build and deliver innovative solutions across the real-estate ecosystem that deepen relationships with industry players, consumers, and brokers/agents.

This role is part of Quality Enablement team. Consumer Quality Enablement is a platform team — not embedded in any single product squad but responsible for the quality infrastructure that serves the entire Consumer Engineering organization: 30+ scrum teams, 400+ repositories, and five surfaces (Web, iOS, Android, Backend Services).

We operate as Quality-as-a-Service. Our job is to build systems, frameworks, and tooling that make it easier for product engineers to ship with confidence — without requiring a dedicated QA resource on every team. We govern, audit , create paved path and enable engineers with tools , process, framework , reporting and governance

What You'll Do

As a Staff SDET on Consumer Quality Enablement, you are the technical backbone of how we build, evolve, and enforce quality infrastructure at scale. You own the design and delivery of the test frameworks, AI-powered tooling, and quality-gate systems that the broader engineering org depends on.

This is a senior individual contributor role. You will not manage people directly, but you will set technical direction, establish standards, and pull other engineers — inside and outside the team — toward higher-quality practices.

What You'll Own

AI-Powered Quality Tooling

• Evolve the Genesis AI test-case generation platform — coverage expansion, prompt engineering, model selection, accuracy measurement.

• Build and maintain the AI RCA (Root Cause Analysis) pipeline that surfaces incident and test-failure context automatically.

• Develop the Test Fix Agent: automated triage, flakiness detection, and patch suggestion for failing tests in CI.

• Define the evaluation harness and quality metrics for all AI tooling — precision, recall, engineer adoption.

Test Framework Infrastructure (Paved Path)

• Own the "Paved Path" for Web (Playwright-based) and Mobile (Appium/iOS XCUITest/Android Espresso) — the opinionated, zero-config test setup that product teams clone to get started.

• Define the layered testing contract: unit → integration → E2E thresholds per surface.

• Build and maintain shared test utilities, fixtures, data factories, and environment-management tooling.

• Integrate with CI/CD pipelines (CircleCI) so quality gates run reliably on every PR with no manual setup from product teams.

Quality Gate Enforcement Platform

• Design and operate the quality-gate system: code coverage gates, PR review gates, build stability gates.

• Build enforcement tooling that moves gates from advisory to blocking — with clear escalation paths and override controls that don't silently waive standards.

• Instrument and surface gate compliance metrics (repos gated, gate-fail-merge rate, PR coverage trends) so engineering leadership has a live quality signal.

• Drive SonarCloud configuration hygiene: quality profiles, branch rules, coverage ingestion, and gate-scoring across all 100+ repositories.

Quality Observability

• Define and own the quality metrics taxonomy: escape rate, main-branch stability, attestable coverage (vs. reported), review depth, incident detection ratio.

• Build dashboards and alerting so EMs and leads get a team-level quality picture without manual data collection.

• Partner with the incident management process to close the loop from production incident → root cause → coverage gap → remediated test.

Technical Leadership

• Author and maintain the quality engineering standards playbook for Consumer Engineering.

• Run architecture reviews for test infrastructure decisions in product squads.

• Mentor senior STEs and SWEs on test design, framework usage, and quality patterns.

• Represent Consumer Quality Enablement in cross-functional engineering forums (release, platform, architecture).

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of software development or SDET experience with at least 3 years at staff/senior staff scope.

• Production-quality engineering skills: you write code that ships to a shared platform, not scripts that live in a test folder.

• Deep experience with at least two of: Playwright/WebdriverIO, XCUITest, Espresso — and a clear framework philosophy, not just syntax familiarity.

• Experience designing test frameworks from the ground up — including fixture management, test data strategy, environment isolation, and parallelization.

• Working knowledge of CI/CD systems (CircleCI, GitHub Actions, or equivalent) and how quality gates integrate into merge workflows.

• Familiarity with AWS services used in CI/CD and data pipelines (Lambda, S3, Bedrock) — enough to own the infrastructure your tooling runs on.

• Experience with contract testing (Pact or equivalent) and API-level quality tooling for microservice or GraphQL architectures.

• Hands-on experience building and evaluating LLM-powered applications, including eval harness design, production model integration, test-generation quality measurement, and regression prevention across model upgrades.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals: system design, API design, code review, observability, and reliability for internal platforms.

• Ability to influence without authority at scale — your platform serves hundreds of engineers; you write docs, run office hours, and make it easy to do the right thing.

• Experience in a platform/enablement team that served multiple product squads.

• Familiarity with SonarCloud, Xray, or other quality gate and test management tooling.

• Python and TypeScript fluency (our AI tooling stack and web test stack respectively).

• Prior work building quality metrics systems — escape rate, flakiness rates, coverage trends — not just dashboards but the data pipelines behind them.

• Mobile app testing experience across both iOS and Android platforms

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.

Nice to Have

• Prior experience in Performance testing for Native apps

• Performance and Load testing basic understanding

Success in this Role

Success here is not measured by test count or coverage percentage alone. It is measured by whether the engineering organization ships with more confidence. The challenge isn't finding bugs; it's building systems that catch the right bugs at the right time automatically.

• You think at the system level, not the ticket level.

• You don't need to be an expert in all of it — but you need to be genuinely curious about all of it.

• You are as comfortable in a data pipeline as you are in a test framework.

• You solve problems top-down.

• You are a force multiplier, not a ticket-taker.

• You are comfortable with ambiguity and willing to get your hands dirty.

• You learn fast, form hypotheses, ship something small, and iterate.

• You are the kind of engineer who makes the team around you better.

• You give direct technical feedback. You write things down.

• You make it easy for product engineers to do the right thing without asking.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.

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