Senior QA Automation Engineer

About this role

ABOUT BUILDOUT

Buildout is the AI deal engine for CRE brokerages, automating every step from first contact to commission. While brokers focus on relationships and winning listings, Buildout handles the workflows behind the scenes, turning manual processes into intelligent, scalable systems. Trusted by over 50,000 brokers, Buildout powers more profitable deals from lead to close. Learn more at www.buildout.com http://www.buildout.com.

THE OPPORTUNITY

We're hiring our first dedicated automation engineer to own end-to-end test automation across our products. Today, our developers write Playwright tests as part of feature work, but we need someone to take real ownership: set the direction for how we do E2E testing, backfill coverage for the critical user journeys we're missing, keep the suite fast and trustworthy, and raise the bar for how the whole engineering team writes tests.

This is a high-autonomy role. You'll define the strategy, not just execute someone else's. You'll pair closely with our DevOps engineer to decide where automated tests live in the pipeline, how often they run, what gates what, and how we scale execution as coverage grows. Over time, you'll take on meaningful ownership of the testing portions of that infrastructure.

You'll succeed here if you treat test code as production code, get genuinely bothered by flaky tests, and enjoy multiplying your impact by making other engineers better.

HOW YOU’LL CONTRIBUTE

- Own the E2E test suite. Design, build, and maintain end-to-end automated tests in Playwright (TypeScript) covering our critical user journeys across products.

- Backfill and prioritize coverage. Audit what we have, identify the highest-risk gaps, and systematically close them.

- Kill flakiness. Own suite reliability end to end: root-cause flaky tests, establish quarantine and retry policies, manage test data and environment stability, and keep signal-to-noise high enough that a red build means something.

- Shape CI integration. Partner with our DevOps engineer on where tests run in the pipeline, execution frequency, parallelization, runtime budgets, and merge/deploy gating.

- Test at the right layer. Know when a check belongs at the API or integration layer instead of the browser, and structure the suite so it stays fast as it grows.

- Enable the team. Coach developers on writing good Playwright tests, review test code, and establish patterns, utilities, and documentation so test authorship scales beyond you.

- Report on quality. Co-own quality metrics including test coverage of critical paths, suite reliability, and defect escape rate, and communicate trends to engineering leadership.

- Use modern tooling. Leverage AI-assisted development (we use Claude Code across engineering) and Playwright's evolving tooling to accelerate test authoring and maintenance.

WHAT MAKES A GREAT CANDIDATE

- 5+ years in quality engineering, test automation, or software engineering with a strong automation focus.

- Deep hands-on Playwright expertise. You've built and maintained substantial E2E suites, not just contributed tests to one.

- Strong TypeScript/JavaScript proficiency. You write test code you'd be comfortable shipping to production.

- CI/CD fluency. Experience integrating and operating test suites in pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI, or similar), including parallelization and selective execution strategies.

- A track record of fixing flakiness. You can talk concretely about how you diagnosed and eliminated unreliable tests at scale.

- Independence and ownership. You can take an ambiguous mandate ("our test coverage needs to be better") and turn it into a prioritized plan you drive to completion.

- Teaching instincts. You've mentored engineers, run code reviews, or otherwise raised a team's testing bar.

- Nice to Have: - API-layer test automation experience (REST, contract testing). - Experience defining quality metrics (defect escape rate, coverage models) and reporting to leadership. - Familiarity with Ruby on Rails applications (our primary application stack - you won't write much Ruby, but you'll test Rails apps). - Experience with test data management, environment provisioning, or Docker-based test infrastructure. - Experience using AI-assisted tools (Claude Code, Copilot, Playwright codegen/MCP) in a testing workflow.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

- 90 days: Own the existing suite, ship coverage beyond the initial 3-5 journeys, the worst flaky tests have been root-caused or quarantined, and you've audited existing coverage and aligned a prioritized backfill plan with engineering leadership.

- 6 months: Critical user journeys have reliable E2E coverage, flakiness is measurably down, and tests are integrated into CI at the right points with clear gating rules.

- 12 months: Full journey set covered and maintained as products evolve (coverage that rots doesn't count), developers across all teams are writing quality tests to your standards without your direct involvement, and suite health and defect escape rate are reported metrics the org trusts.

- With success comes future growth potential: - Quality engineering leadership. You'll be the person who defines what quality engineering means at Buildout. As the company grows, that can mean owning the quality discipline across all product teams (strategy, standards, and metrics) and shaping how we hire and grow in this area. - Test platform and infrastructure ownership. Deepen the partnership with DevOps into genuine co-ownership of the delivery pipeline: test environments, ephemeral infrastructure, deployment gating, and the tooling that makes fast, safe releases possible. - Expanding the testing surface. E2E is where we're investing first, but performance testing, load testing, contract testing, and AI-assisted quality tooling are all open territory with no incumbent owner.

ROLE DETAILS

Location: Thi

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