Staff Software Engineer, Quality Engineering

About this role

WHO WE ARE

GridUnity is the industry leader in interconnection life cycle management, delivering cutting-edge software solutions that eliminate bottlenecks in the interconnection process and accelerate the transition to a more affordable, sustainable, and resilient energy future.

Our Mission

We unite all grid interconnection stakeholders on a single platform that converts centralized data into actionable intelligence and accelerates the transition to a reliable, sustainable, and cost-efficient electric grid.

GridUnity is a trusted partner to leading utilities, grid operators, and policymakers. Our technology solutions tackle the interconnection queue backlog by significantly reducing processing times. Whether cutting transmission interconnection timelines from years to months or enabling distribution applications to be processed within a day, we help accelerate energy projects at every scale.

Our Vision Energizing the planet with a faster, smarter, and more sustainable grid.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

As the Staff Software Engineer, Quality Engineering, you will own and lead GridUnity's quality engineering strategy. GridUnity engineering operates on an AI-native, artifact-first development model: AI agents draft tests, run executions, and write automation, while humans arbitrate evidence, own release verdicts, and continuously calibrate agent judgment. Version one of that quality system is live today for our flagship product line: agents draft manual tests from feature specs and stories through a gated workflow with documented why-manual criteria; QA reviews and activates them; releases run through evidence-backed gates in our test-management system of record; and a quality operations console harvests it all nightly. You will take ownership of that system, make it hold under real delivery pressure, and scale it across every product line.

This is not a traditional QA role, and it is not a traditional test-automation role either. You will serve as a technical leader, architect, and change agent who makes quality a property of the engineering system itself: honest release gates, a defensible (and deliberately shrinking) catalog of human-judgment testing, and evaluation mechanisms that tell us exactly where human attention is needed. The mechanisms exist; the discipline is young. Some of the hardest parts - keeping review throughput inside its SLA, making gates stick under deadline pressure, retiring manual tests as automation catches up - are exactly where you will earn your impact. Reporting within Engineering Operations, you'll partner closely with Product Engineering, Platform Engineering, and DevOps to improve release confidence while accelerating delivery.

You will:

- Own the quality operating model - currently live for our flagship product line - and lead its expansion across the organization's product lines, evolving the technical vision and roadmap as it scales.

- Operate and harden the pipeline in which agents generate, maintain, and execute test coverage - API, UI, integration, contract, performance, and end-to-end - directly from feature specs and scenario contracts, with human review and activation workflows that keep the coverage trustworthy.

- Run the review-and-activation loop: drafts arrive continuously from engineers, product, and agents, and the review SLA is a promise to the whole organization - you keep throughput honest and the draft queue moving.

- Own the release-gate discipline: execution records as evidence, explicit exit criteria, named waivers, evidence-backed sign-off, and escalation paths. The gate mechanics are built; making them hold under deadline pressure - every release, no silent exceptions - is the job.

- Steward the criteria for what remains human-tested, and stand up the demotion loop that retires manual tests as automation capability catches up - a shrinking manual catalog is a success metric, not a loss. The first demotion pass will be yours to run.

- Build the evaluation discipline for agent-driven quality from the ground up: establish a calibration corpus of golden human verdicts, continuously score agent verdicts against it, and use escape-rate data to steer where human review effort is concentrated.

- Champion developer-owned quality by embedding automated testing into the software development lifecycle and CI/CD pipelines.

- Advance behavioral validation as an external evaluation function - persona walkthroughs, exploratory charters, and judgment-based testing that verify behavior matches intent, not merely that specs pass.

- Partner with Engineering Managers and Staff Engineers to improve software reliability, maintainability, and developer productivity.

- Mentor engineers and QA teammates through code reviews, pairing sessions, and technical design discussions - including the discipline of articulating why something is wrong precisely enough that the articulation becomes agent capability.

- Define engineering quality metrics - escape rate, agent-verdict calibration, catalog trends, waiver frequency, deployment success - and use data to continuously improve software reliability and customer experience.

- Evaluate emerging testing technologies, agentic engineering practices, and AI-assisted development tools to continuously evolve GridUnity's engineering capabilities.

- Serve as a technical thought leader, influencing engineering strategy and helping establish a culture where agents generate coverage, humans arbitrate evidence, and quality is engineered - not inspected.

WHERE THE SYSTEM STANDS TODAY

We believe candor about the starting point matters for a role like this. What's already running: the quality operating model is documented and live for our flagship product line; an agent-drafting workflow ships review-ready manual tests against documented why-manual criteria, enforced in the ticket lifecycle; a daily manual regression cadence is green; the first evidence-backed release gate is stood up in our test-man

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